UX design challenges — What to expect for your job hunt? Samples & resources
You’re almost there. You entered the selection process and have passed now several rounds of interviews in order to land your UX, UX/UI, or product dream job. Congrats! By now, your work experience should be valued and interviewers believe in your potential to join the team. There is just one thing they still want to assess before committing to hiring: your technical skills.
While being a widespread practice in tech recruitment, technical assessments are being regularly questioned by managers and HR teams. For some, they are simply not as relevant as they seem. It is indeed difficult to measure the amount of time candidates spend on the challenge or if they have received any help to accomplish the required tasks. Most of the time though, it is still considered an essential step to all good hiring, avoiding charisma-based recruitment and bad surprises for both parties.
Get some perspective
Indeed, this test says as much about your future employer as it says about you. Does the company you’re interviewing for is asking you to send back your design challenge for yesterday? Is your case study about a real problem with the company’s current product? It is the perfect time to spot red flags. But not only. Chances are also high that this design challenge looks close to what your day-to-day job will look like. What skills do you need to be successful in this exercise? Is it craft? Is it strategy? Research? Is the brief vague or detailed? Is this matching your interests? Your strengths? Sometimes it can also be the opportunity to reassess how much you want the position.
Prioritise and set boundaries
Asking yourself the right questions will help you prioritise. If you are proactively looking for a job, you may be at a similar stage of the process with several companies. You might as well just start feeling drained by your job hunt. After a while, I personally, developed my own tactic. I would, for instance, systematically ask: “How long should I take to complete this case study?”. It helped me to gauge how much work was expected from me. Then, I would try to stick to the allocated time as much as possible. It allowed me to see if my speed of work was enough for the position or when my interviewers were just irrational.
Sometimes, of course, I went overtime because I loved the topics but I set myself not to spend more than 10 hours on one in particular though. I would then specify to recruiters where I stopped for the allocated time and how much more I spent to deliver the challenge as seen. This can be very appreciated by employers as it means you care about time management, a precious skill to have when you apply for agencies or consultancy firms where you need to know how to work independently; be wary of deadlines and clients’ invoicing.
Fight for restitution and feedback
If not set by default, I would also recommend you ask clearly for a restitution meeting to be given a voice and support your design choices. A perfect end result to your challenge is generally not the expected outcome. Instead, what matters is for the interviewer to understand your train of thought, the way you handle problems, and if you are able to sell your project.
It also allows you to gather feedback and improve yourself in case your application doesn’t go through. It is important, I believe, that every time you receive a rejection, you understand why and work in progress accordingly. For every company that is not able to provide you with a proper one then recognise you haven’t lost much in the change not proceeding further with your application.
Samples and Resources
I selected some of the design challenges I had to go through, during my last job hunt, in the hope this might help some current job seekers to have a rough idea of what is awaiting them. They are anyways good exercises and could be used as well to strengthen a portfolio if needed.
A very complete and detailed challenge mixing design critic, bug prioritisation, mock-ups creation, personal definitions of concepts as well as purely logical and mathematical problems solving exercises.
A speedy case study (1 hour only) that focuses on the ability to prioritise tasks, think and generate ideas quickly on a clear brief.
Precise tasks to complete with an emphasis on craft and project management.
Best of luck! Success is around the corner.
