Presenting work in interviews
TL; DR:
1: Tell me what the brief is
2: Talk me through your design process and show a couple of images: sketches, people that did your user testing, card sorting etc
3: Did you come up with multiple ideas, show an image of the ones you didn’t take forward if it shows off some broader thinking of the problem.
4: Show me the solution, prototypes, interactive pieces, printed material if you have any.
5: Ask some questions!
Every year we offer a few design assistant positions here at OpenTable. In this process we look through some amazing work, meet some great people and have someone come in and give us fresh perspective and thinking on how we can solve problems. They provide great inspiration and in turn we hope that the person learns some new skills, has an insight into how a design team functions within a product environment and give them experience that hopefully will help with their studies or future employment.
During the interviewing process we see a range of presentations and although we don’t give feedback to individuals we thought we’d give some general feedback on how to best present your work: you’ve spent all this time producing some beautiful, well thought through work but sometimes telling the story of what, how and why you got to where you are doesn’t come through and the details I’m really interested in aren’t there.
NB: The below isn’t one-size-fits-all solution but hopefully is a good basis on how to present, and in turn make for a smoother interview for you and will help your interviewers follow what you’re presenting.
The beginning of your interview:
At the beginning of an interview the person interviewing should set the scene, tell you who they are and what they do in the company so you understand to what end you’ll be working with them (If you know the names of your interviewers before hand you might look at them on LinkedIn so you can feel a bit more prepared). When given the opportunity you should talk about yourself and what your current position is (have you graduated, are you in between years at University) and then tell me about what you’re about to show.
The brief:
When it comes to showing a project, it’s up to you how you present, but before you start presenting the work tell me about the brief:
– Was it a set brief? Did you write the brief? Were there deliverables for the brief, or was it more of an exploratory project where the outcomes would be decided as you moved through the project and found the best way to execute the original brief?
This helps set the scene, and helps put me in the right mindset of what I am about to see.
Research and exploration:
You might want to show your solutions to the project that fulfill the brief, and I would like to see them, but show me some workings first. Talk about how you tackled the project, what was the first thing you did? What research did you conduct? Did you browse competitors, did you ask users to test out competitors websites to find out what the liked, didn’t like, did you use a survey to get some opinions? Maybe you identified the users of a product, and ask them to prioritise a set of features from most to least important.
You might just show a scan of a sketchbook, or a photograph of you doing some research, and use this as a way of discussing what you did to work out where the project should go.
And from this research and exploration did you identify a set of problems from your users, what were they? Did you have to rethink the original brief?
Ideas:
It’s great that you’ve probably boiled down the brief to a single solution, but I really enjoy seeing other ideas that you had: there’s never a single solution to a problem and so seeing ideas that you sketched out that you can talk about is really interesting for me and shows your ability to think broadly. You might also show the beginning ideas of your final idea too If you have them as sketches. Again — I don’t need to see loads of images, just one or two that show me some of your thinking that could have taken you in different directions.
Development and solution:
Did you develop more ideas than just the final solution? If you developed a couple of ideas before settling on one, you might want to show these too, tell us why you didn’t push forward an idea. When you came to the final design, show us the layouts, did you create a set of grids, did you create some guidelines, build a prototype? If you had some printed material, bring them along and let us see them!
Most importantly:
1: Ask a couple of questions after like ‘what might I be working on?’, ‘what is a usual day for you?’, ‘what is the make up of the team I would be working in’.
2: Show enough to keep me interested but not so much that you hammer home that you did some sketching/research/user research etc: I can always ask questions and talk to you about it if I want to know more.
3: After the interview if you have an email for someone in the company, just send them an email afterwards thanking them for their time, especially if you’re interested in the role.
