Really Bad Design Exercises

As we at the Wall Street Journal kick off a new round of hiring¹, I’m reminded of my least favorite practice in design hiring: the Exercise. Why do we put ourselves through it? Why do we put each other through it? What could we possibly gain from it? I’d like to hazard an answer these questions. I also have a strange idea of how to improve the exercise — more on that in a bit.

What is the Exercise?

Pretty much every design hiring process

The Exercise is one step in most organizations’ design hiring process. It happens somewhere between interviews and a hiring decision. It usually comes in one of three flavors:

• “Fix our product” — A designer asks the candidate to do their work for them.
• “Fix someone else’s product” — The candidate is asked to redesign a portion of an existing product. Since it’s someone else’s product, the candidate has no context or insight into why the product works the way it does. Alex Barashkov provided a strongly-worded send up on the shortcomings of such redesigns.
• “Design an imaginary product” — The candidate is given a hypothetical brief, and designs a product from scratch. This has been my preferred Exercise in the past, but it…