Beware the “Design Test”

Before I landed my current position I spent some significant time interviewing for various senior design positions at a variety of companies. Overall these processes were similar. They started with a vet from a recruiter, then a conversation with a hiring manager, a portfolio review and then often an in person interview as a final step. Yet I found the real variable in this process to be the take home “design test” and after a while I found these tests showed me a lot about the company that was administering them.

The “design test” is a task administered by companies to design position candidates, ideally in order to discern the candidates process and work ability in a controlled scenario. In general I am not a fan of design tests. Firstly, I know few other industries that ask candidates to do the work — that they will eventually be hired to do — for free before they have an employment offer. A lawyer friend of mine recently accepted a job at a new firm, they didn’t ask him to do a mock trial beforehand to “better understand his process”. Why are designers different? If a designer has a decent resume, real work experience and a portfolio that can be reviewed in depth, it should be enough information to tell a hiring manager what he/she needs to know about this designer’s track record.

Secondly, these tests are not indicative of how a designer will actually work on a real world problem. These tests are hypothetical, often devoid of context or discovery materials and are done in a silo. That is not how UX designers work. Our design thinking is done using data, discovery tools, collaborative exercises and exists within a much larger ecosystem that is the product — which includes other designers, real stakeholders, real users, product managers, developers, etc etc. To give a designer a vague, contrived task to complete in a week as a method to discern how he/she might solve a problem is like trying to discover how talented a brain surgeon is by watching them play the game “Operation”. It’s ineffective and unrealistic. And I know of more than one talented designer who has struck out on this stage of the hiring process for this reason alone.

Thirdly, these tests are often poorly constructed in their own right. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to do a design test that goes something like, “redesign the app [in the same…