Get ready for your next design challenge with this tiny helper

Have you ever been hooked by the word “answers” in the title of the book? There is always this slight naive hope that you will get silver bullet universal answers for all your questions around a particular topic, and that will solve all the issues that await you around the corner. More often than not it’s not the case, but with the following book, I was left quite satisfied by the kind of answers I received.

/Artiom Dashinsky “Solving Product Design Exercises: Questions and Answers”/

If you are reading this text, you probably have already applied or thought of applying for your first design job or maybe not even the first one. Well, you are definitely one of those people who knows what a design challenge or a design exercise is. Perhaps you even went through a couple or a lot of those. Most likely they made you feel stressed. There is usually a time pressure and fear to slip into a wrong solution, especially if you don’t have enough experience just yet. You want to do your best during the design exercise. It’s one shot one hit after all 🤷‍♀️.

This tiny book by Artiom Dashinskiy helped me to put less stress on myself while going through design exercises from the companies and always be sure that my solution is structured and well explained.

It’s a short book, but it is packed with practical tips. It goes from an overview of what kind of design exercise you can get during the interviewing process, why companies like design exercises, and what they actually assess to a specific method of how to tackle product design exercises.

The framework Artiom suggests for structuring your answer when presenting a solution to a company is 5W1H. This problem-solving method is widely used in journalism and police investigation. In the book, it was adapted to solving Product Design exercises.

5W1H

• Why am I building this?
• Who am I building it for?
• Where and when the product is used?
• What am I building?
• How could I measure success?

To me, the 5W1H method feels as if you are going through a Design Thinking process in one hour, answering only the most important questions and introducing your assumptions where the blind spots are. The book guides you through this process in a very clear and detailed way. Though it focuses more on Product Design indeed, I believe the approach can be applied to any kind of problem-solving.

Some of my highlights:

The one most important thing while solving the design exercise is to follow the process.

Ask questions. It’s one of the most important skills of a great designer. If there is no way to get the answer to some questions, make assumptions! Your ability to do it will be evaluated during the interview.

Be critical about your solutions and be able to explain all the “why” behind your design.

Design for a user but don’t forget about business needs

I’ve read this book way before having my first design interview or even thinking of applying for a design job, though it remains one of those that I keep reviewing, it has multiple lines highlighted and pages bookmarked, and it’s definitely most borrowed amongst my fellow designers.

So, yeah, enjoyed and recommended!

And what is the design book you are coming back to over and over again?