Mastering product design interviews
Design exercise solutions that land offers
Principles to follow, real world case study that landed a big offer plus lessons from failed take home design exercises
You’ve passed the phone screen and have been asked to do the take home design exercise. What’s next? In addition to the approach, I’ll share my process with an in-depth example that landed me a great offer at a major consulting company. I’m also including lessons learned from failures.
Why a take home design exercise?
Companies use design exercises to assess your:
- Process in how you approach and solve ambiguous problems,
- Craft skills and how fast you can deliver high quality work,
- Divergent thinking — generating different ideas quickly,
- Prioritization—converging on critical concepts that lead to impact
Design exercises have faults built-in: they’re artificial, take a long time to complete, require high effort, to name a few. However, I believe you can play to your strengths by highlighting your potential.
Maybe your current job didn’t offer you the right environment to prove yourself. Or you think your portfolio isn’t an accurate representation of what you can do now. It happens. Now’s your chance to show off those skills.
Nine principles for a successful design exercise
There are no shortcuts but you can increase your chances by:
Practicing — if you’ve never done a design exercise, practice by finding a problem you’re interested in. Give yourself a deadline, write a prompt, do it in the allotted time, and give yourself an objective evaluation.
Understanding context and questions — get to know the constraints and how your work will be evaluated.
Going above and beyond — after understanding the baseline requirements, see how you can exceed expectations. As Paul Graham says,
The best protection is always working on hard problems
Letting the narrative guide your presentation — it’s not about the technology or the process—it’s about how all the work you’ve done helps the customer lead a better life.
Showing and curating process — generate lots of ideas and be deliberate in what you focus on. If it doesn’t make your narrative stronger — leave it.
Talking to customers —actually talk to people. Yes this will be a biased, convenience sample but having rough customer feedback is better than none at all. Scrappiness is a virtue.
Synthesizing findings — show the meaning you’ve extracted from disparate data sources to frame the problem accurately.
Treating it like work — imagine you’re already working at this company, how would you approach the challenge?
Delighting the client — when your foundation is solid can you add a cherry on top that leaves interviewers in awe? From Ueno,
When someone asks you for a coffee, bring the best one you can, but always add a piece of chocolate.
Start by understanding context
Ok, you have your design exercise prompt. What should you do first? Since this is a high-stakes project it’s important to get context upfront to save time executing on the right direction:
What is the final deliverable?
What are they looking for? Is this a mobile app, a sitemap, a research brief or a desktop app? Are they looking for you to show your skills in interaction design, information architecture, research, visual design? This should be clear from the prompt.
What’s unclear?
Even with clear prompts you’re still bound to have questions. That’s a good sign. Generate a list, reread the prompt and think how the answers can help you move faster when you’re heads down on challenge.
How collaborative do they want to be?
Interviewers might be willing or expect to provide feedback during the course of your work. You should both be on the same page as to how often you can reach out, to who, what feedback you should get and when.
When is your deliverable due?
Structure the deadline to your advantage. When I had a lull in work it was easy for me to focus intensely on the design exercise to get it done. Other times I’ve taken a day off or pushed back on the start date of the exercise so I could work on it over the weekend.
What are your options?
Design exercises are time intensive—some companies offer the choice of a whiteboard collaboration instead. I took this option when I was deep in two exercises already. This saved me time, deliver high quality work for the other two and the interviewers felt they got everything that they needed from the whiteboard. So consider exploring your options here.
How will you present your work?
Usually at the end of the design exercise you’ll present at their office. If possible, try to get a sense of what you’ll be working with: their room set up, monitor, seating, etc. It’s always good to know your context and be prepared with backup in case their tech fails.
Now let’s take a look at how you can implement these in practice.
The design exercise that led to a higher title and salary
This design exercise for a management consulting company bumped my title and salary up 21% from previous role. After several weeks of interviews I was in a position to decide among three great offers with amazing teams. I want you to experience the same struggle.
For this exercise I had a choice of designing a mobile app for civic engagement or creating a UI for a self-driving car. I chose the latter because it felt difficult. As Paul Graham says, “the best protection is always working on hard problems”.
I received this exercise while scrambling to wrap up another take home project. Usually I try to reach out to the interviewer with lots of questions before I start on the work but in this case I had to dive right in.
I began by typing half baked thoughts on my phone in the notes app on how to approach the exercise while riding the train to my next interview. The train itself was an inspiration — could public transit be the answer?
Analogs to inform the future
I pursued the mass transit idea further by looking into Emirates airlines and other luxury transit services. The luxurious interiors looked nice but what about everyday mass commuters? What are their existing activities and habits when taking the train to work?
I didn’t have time to set up a proper study so I relied on three 12 minute interviews with friends and asked them about their experience with riding trains, busses, ferries, etc. From searching online and from the conversations I identified four major categories of activities on mass transit: productivity, relaxation, social, and health.
Questioning assumed problems
When you’re going deep on the design exercise it helps to periodically step back and remind yourself about the problem you’re trying to solve. In my case the prompt was asking for an in-car UI design for a self driving car.
I decided to take a slightly different approach because many car manufacturers have been addressing this problem for decades. Redesigning the car display would be optimizing for local maxima prematurely.
What if we could expand the display from a small tablet to include the windshield? And what if the car was smart enough to capture inputs from the outside world and provide contextual info.
Technology without an explicit need is like a solution looking for a problem. As designers it’s our responsibility to take technology’s raw potential, intersect it with customer needs, and build a solution that drives results.
As an example, augmented reality (AR) can be a solution but it can also get out of hand. As designer Keiichi Matsuda shows in his explorations an AR that bombards a city resident with visual noise promoting anxiety. I’ve included this in my presentation as an extreme example that I chose to steer away from.
I also considered voice assistants. After all even Ironman’s advanced AR suit still had an omnipresent assistant.
To see how these technologies could work (or collide together) in the customer’s space when they’re taking transportation I started doing some light synthesis with some simplified diagramming.
This led me to a few core principles for me to evaluate my work against,
- Personal—the assistant should deeply understand the individual or individuals sitting in the car
- Unintrusive—in today’s age of digital minimalism, the technology should let the customer be in the driver’s seat
- Contextual—provide relevant suggestions based on context and customer’s interests
Although I didn’t explicitly mention these anywhere in my presentation, having these explicitly documented held me be accountable by enforcing constraints which led to a streamlined concept.
Exploring general solutions with storyboards
With problem discovery done, I did some rough explorations via storyboard sketches showing how a car interior could transform to a suitable activity from an interactive gym inside a car, to a productivity station, to an experience that connects two strangers together by showing activities and people they have in common.
Continuing reading this article on Holloway and get into the details to make your design exercise stand out.
Land Your Dream Design Job is a comprehensive book about landing a product design role in a startup, agency, or tech company. It covers the entire design interview process from beginning to end, and will arm you with techniques and strategies to navigate the (at times) turbulent waters of job searching with confidence. This book will help guide you to a role that plays to your strengths while providing enough support for professional growth.
You’ll learn:
- What skills are expected of designers
- How to demonstrate those skills throughout the job search process
- How to identify your next opportunity
- How to target your job search process to stand out
- How to build a stand-out portfolio and tailor it to your dream opportunity
- The ins and outs out of various design interview types from portfolio presentations, whiteboard challenges, app critiques, to take home design exercises and many others.
You’ll also find in-depth advice on how to apply beyond the job boards, and how to conduct due diligence, negotiate compensation, and accelerate onboarding to your new role.
