Design Tasks
Imagine interviewing for a product designer role. You aced your screening call with the hiring partner, second round interview with product/tech, and hopefully an interview with an *actual* design professional, but now comes the hard part:
“We give all our candidates a ‘design task’.”
“Ok we need you to design a mobile shopping flow for a fictional product. Come up with designs, explain your design process and include any other research or insights you gathered, and any other artefacts.”
“Ok how long should I spend on this task (free work)?”
“2–3 hours”
Design Tasks are *dreadful*
Um, look I don’t know how to tell you this, but the quantification of design is not how ‘good’ it is. This is merely a subjective reaction based on a persons opinion or taste. Or how fast you can do it. Thats not a metric of design.
Getting potential candidates to do unpaid work to see who is the ‘best’?
“The CEO is going to pick the best one… good luck!”
You can’t hire people using a competition, this is not reality television. Also top tip, your CEO is not the best person to decide which is the best ‘design’. Thats the job of your design team, and hopefully your qualitative user data.
Design tasks are counter productive
Product design is about writing a brief, understanding the users pain points, defining the problems to solve, ideating solutions, understanding constraints, technical and business logic, and prototyping solutions to test with users, before delivering valuable updates.
But f**k all that let’s see how you do without ANY of that fluff, hit me with your best work, in under the time it takes to even write a small brief.
Design tasks are the hiring version of ‘design is my passion’
But how do we find the right person?
Well if you are hiring designers, you need to start by having a look at their work. A real look, not a cursory peek.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a visual document, preferably accessible online, that adequately conveyed a persons design skills, process and experience, as well as hopefully a case study conveying their process and approach to problem solving?
Well there is, it's called a ‘portfolio’.
Anyone with a cursory understanding of both the discipline of product design and the process will know how to review design portfolios. You find the work that is most relevant, and get the designer to walk you through the project, explain their role and what they did to ameliorate a service or product, through the lens of the user.
Ask them challenging questions, ascertain whether their claims are legit. Have a look at their attention to detail, find out what problems were solved and why. Make sure they have a thorough understanding of the entire end to end process, ascertain how they work with product and engineering, how they deal with stakeholders, design with data, how they test, and what their personal pain points are with design at this type of organisation.
After an hour, the candidates suitability will rise or fall. You will filter down the main candidates using ‘experience’. Choosing the winning candidate out of the 2–3 that make the cut, well that comes down to diversity, salary or maybe ‘culture fit’ (diversity). But the person you hire will be solid.
Until recently, this was the way to hire good designers. But something changed in the process.
Part of the problem in hiring now is that the buyers are not the users. People who are hiring designers don’t understand user-centred design, and designers cant be hired using the same process as a developer or a product owner, both of which can be quantified by real world metrics and the shipping of decent products.
Design tasks aren’t realistic
Design is about problem solving, it’s a team sport, and there are a ton of variables and more importantly, constraints. Also you need to understand the pain point at both organisation and customer level. So how do you show you are great at all this by knocking up something ‘cool’ in 3 hours?
Well of course you can’t.
Here is a design task that I received from a UK Fintech, for a Lead UI designer role (100k+package):
Lead UI task
Who would you look to for inspiration?
Feel free to get creative and include your reasoning/thinking.
Provide 1–2 examples of a fresh app look.
Using our core brand elements (eg: logo and colours) how would you redesign our apps user interface to take our visual identity to to the next level?
What other existing elements of the brand or UI would you keep, which would you remove completely?
Also spend no more than 3 hours on this task (free redesign).
Look I don’t know how to tell you this, but I cant just knock out stuff to order. Experience design is not a microwave pizza, it’s a Beef Wellington. Epicurean analogies are tenuous, but you get my point.
It’s a ridiculous exercise that in no way quantifies my talent or integrity, management and oversight style, or any kind of process or design thinking. My portfolio and experience should be adequate. It’s your job to create a framework of hiring that understands design.
I’ve only got past a screening call with hiring, not even a proper interview with product or design leaders yet and right off the bat they asked me to do a redesign, in 2–3 hours (come on now we both know this is a couple of days at least), with zero prep or research.
I bailed.
Next one:
UX Designer Task
Please aim to spend no more than 3 hours on this task
Task
Design a mobile shopping experience for “(redacted)”, a fictional new product that (client) will offer (redacted)
Please include:
1. A brief outline of your process
2. An overview of the journey a customer might go through
3. Indicative designs for key screens (high fidelity is not expected)
4. 1–2 sentences on what you’d look for to indicate this was successfulWe suggest a presentation format for simplicity but feel free to use any format you like to submit your task.
Your task will initially be reviewed offline.
Assessment Criteria
Customer centricity & empathy — how you think about making sure your solution meets the needs of customers
Creativity & exploration — how you try out different ideas before converging on your choices
Quality of communication — how you communicate your assumptions & choices and why you make them
Design thinking — how you leverage design principles to inform the journeys & interfaces you design
I redacted the names and also the ‘fictional product’ which I thought was by far the worst idea for a product I have ever seen, and I am old enough to remember hedgehog crisps and death cigarettes.
Bailed on this too.
You wont hire the right person based on the outcome of this task, as anyone who can even attempt that in 3 hours or submit to trying to answer a brief for something that both does not exist and satiates absolutely no user need, yet can come up with a design with no research, is in no way serious about product design, and is just trying to get the gig.
I would need at least two days to write a proper brief for that, and at least a week to research. I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting that in front of a designer, stakeholder or customer.
The entire premise is the actual opposite of design thinking.
Here is some ACTUAL design process:
Discover
What are we actually doing here? We should be discovering insights into ACTUAL user requirements and solving real world solutions. This is crass ’solutionising’ using a novelty idea. Define the problem, then ideate solutions.
Define
What problem are we solving here? People need help connecting devices, not another gimmick product which sounds like it is an April fools day joke
Develop
You’ve already suggested a mobile web flow — without even fleshing out the ‘why’ and the ‘how’.
Deliver
No one will buy this, and the battery life will be awful. It’s a dreadful idea
Obviously I never heard back.
Alternative take home tasks
If you absolutely have to have some more ‘proof’ that someone is good, or right for you (these are two distinctly different propositions BTW) then ask them to do something light and fun.
Format — 2 hours, timeboxed. Whenever you like.
Deliverables — again, whatever you like, design does not need to be pixel perfect, it can be a scribble or a story.
Research and ideate
Research a product/service and ideate a new feature. 1 slide on the research insights, 1 slide on the idea.
Write a bit
Ask them to write something about design that is relevant to their job search. Writing about design should be part of any job search, as you can clearly espouse broadly on how you want your work to impact the industry.
Critique
Give them 2 hours to tear the current product down and clearly list problems to solve. This does 2 things:
- Shows you can identify problems and;
- Tell truth to power
Case study walkthrough
Get them to walk you through a project from define to deliver. Try to see what went right, what went wrong, what they enjoyed, what they didn’t and how they would change things the next time around. What learnings can they bring into their game and how they deal with complexity, failure, constraints and such.
LinkedIn is awash with the same phrase, “Let fix design hiring”. Well this is where to start.
Thanks for reading!
Mx
p.s. If you like this sort of thing I also write about other stuff on my Substack
