“Have you done a whiteboard challenge before?”
Nope, but I rocked it by relying on the fundamentals of design thinking.
It was my first design challenge during a mock technical interview. Yikes. Although I had read a few articles on what whiteboard challenges were, I had never actually done one before. You can imagine how nervous I was when my interviewer, Peter, told me we’d be running through one and that it was going to be fast and fun. Fast? Sure. Fun? Hardly!
(It actually was fun, though.)
Grab a cup of coffee and make sure you’re comfortable because this is gonna be comprehensive!
STEP 1: Take a deep breath and let the process guide you.
I know it sounds obvious enough, but if there’s one thing my design instructor at Designation drilled into my head, it’s “process. process. process”. Or as the Backstreet Boys famously said:
I know the process, and I know they know the process, but the why still needs to be said out loud. Basically, this interview is not meant to be a checklist of the design process; it’s meant to figure out whether or not you understand why the process is the way it is and what each step is contributing towards the whole. It’s your ability to manifest the design process they’re interested in, not you listing off a bunch of technical terms.
As any good UX designer (more than slightly) obsessed with research, I knew the first thing I had to do was get more information about the user and the business.
WHY: Granted, this was a fake business and a fake problem, but I still needed real information to work with that I could use to guide the design process.
STEP 2: Define your scope!
During past projects, the first thing my team and I would do is look at the project brief and wrap our heads around what the business goals were, what the market looked like, and where our opportunity space was.
WHY: Knowing all of this would help me define the scope of this project and identify the main value proposition to focus on for this challenge.
Since it was just me and Peter (and I only had about 5 minutes for this portion of the challenge), I asked him to step into the role of the company to give me an idea about the business, the technical constraints I should be aware of, and what the vision was for this product. I also had the additional, very real, constraint of time: I had only had 15 minutes for this challenge!
Peter explained that the client was looking to develop an app used by parents and babysitters that would leverage social networks as well as word-of-mouth recommendations to match parents up with available babysitters in their area for last-minute needs. The client assumed parents would prefer to hire babysitters who were recommended by friends and neighbors.
STEP 3: Now, what about your users?
The obvious next step is to understand the user, figure out what their immediate need is, they’re doing currently to solve for that need, and what the pain-points in those processes are that are hindering them from having a positive overall experience.
WHY: This would help us later on in coming up with ideas to solve for those needs and pain-points.
Our team would normally interview 8 to 10 individuals, more if we could source them. But again, I had 5 minutes for this part and it was just me and Peter in a virtual room. So I adapted out of necessity, and the interviewer became the interviewee.
“Let’s pretend like we’re the users. What is prompting us to use this service? What do we need this service to do for us? What is our larger goal? What would success look like? What is our experience using current services? What do we like? What are we struggling with? What would be really helpful for us? Why? Let’s walk through the process of using a current service.”
WHY: With each question, I was narrowing down on the user’s needs, goals, and motivations — essentially creating a rough persona. By asking about the current process, I got a better idea of what the user was experiencing, what areas we could immediately jump in to fix, and some long-term solutions as well — aka, I ran a quick-and-dirty journey mapping exercise with Peter. This also had the benefit of getting his buy-in and made him feel like he was part of the process!
STEP 4: You know what they say about assumptions…
They can wreck your design process!
WHY: Acknowledging any assumptions about the users, the business, and the opportunity space at this stage would help make sure I validate (or invalidate) them throughout the design process.
As I mentioned earlier, the client assumed that location and trustworthiness were two key factors that determined which babysitters parents would choose. We also assumed that current availability and trusted recommendations would be important metrics for both our primary users, the parents, and our secondary users, the babysitters. Who our primary and secondary users would be were also assumptions on our end! Lastly, we assumed our fictitious company had all the material and human resources in the world and that we were free to come up with the craziest ideas possible if that meant we were helping our users.
Now that we had an idea of our constraints, assumptions, user needs, and user goals, I moved on to the most fun part (in my opinion) of the design process: ideation.
STEP 5: Come up with your craziest (but functional) ideas!
While going through our users’ needs and some assumptions we had about their current experience, we came up with a list of features we wanted to explore further.
WHY: These features could be as insane as possible but still had to solve for the needs of our users and eliminate their pain-points. I also needed to make sure the ideas could be translated visually in the form of a sketch.
Some ideas we came up with were: visibility of available babysitters, location awareness, recommendations, availability of babysitters based on time (i.e. next 5–10 minutes, next 30 minutes, etc.), an illustrated map view of your neighborhood, using social media network to expand recommendations for babysitters, visibility of reviews, providing selection criteria based on budget, providing selection criteria based on your child’s interests (i.e. if a babysitter plays the violin and your son wants to learn)… the list is pretty long but we threw out as many ideas as we could come up with in 5 minutes.
We were having so much fun collaborating that we sort of lost track of time. Whoops! Peter realized we had less than 3 minutes left in the challenge, so he asked me to design just one screen that would highlight some of the ideas we came up with to solve for our users’ needs and goals.
STEP 6: Do a (very rough) sketch of a couple of ideas
Behold, this absolutely amazing screen that I made on Sketch. I know, I know. It’s phenomenal, a true work of art that belongs in the Louvre.
WHY: As simple as it is, it allowed me to get across some keys ideas on how to visually convey the location, recommendation, and availability of babysitters to parents on the app, three things that were important to our primary users.
I talked Peter through my idea as I was sketching it: the grey box is a map with the circles as indicators for the location and availability of babysitters in the area. The darker the circle, the more recommendations they have from your contacts. Anticipating parents’ need for the credibility of service, I decided to integrate their social media channels and their zip code. This would allow us to leverage their existing social and physical network as a method of ensuring trustworthiness — you’re more likely to trust someone if your neighbor recommends them rather than recommendations from virtual strangers.
WHY: Talking out loud helped him understand why I was sketching certain things, how they related to user needs, and how anticipating second order needs would help increase user satisfaction with the app.
STEP 7: Lessons Learned
15 minutes seems like a long time, right?
Wrong.
It flew by! I credit that to how robust the design process is and how much there is to pack within a small duration that would ordinarily take weeks or months to accomplish. But you have to remember that you’re not actually creating a product during these challenges (or, not usually). It’s all about communicating your process to the interviewer so that (1) they understand you recognize the value of each step in the design process and how the steps gradually build on each other to create a holistic solution for users and (2) they have confidence you can successfully tackle any real-world challenge through collaboration and creativity.
If I could do it all again, I’d probably save a little more time for the sketching, but given that this was my first ever design challenge, I think I handled it pretty well. In preparation for upcoming interviews, I’m working on strengthing my design process for whiteboard challenges so if you have any tips/advice for me, please comment below!
Thanks for reading :)
