Unpaid UX Work Disguised As “Design Exercises”: How To Handle It

After a very enjoyable initial call where I had a great rapport with the interviewer, she explained that the next round of interviews was a design exercise: I was to redesign a section of their existing product. If the CEO liked it, I’d move on to the next round of interviews.

This is a request I hadn’t heard in years. They were seriously expecting me to redesign a part of their product for free. All those traumatic memories and emotions I experienced in my first years of working (and being exploited) as a designer came welling back up. I was livid. How could they be so exploitative? And this was a company making software for churches, no less! They should know better!

Many people have written about why you shouldn’t do this kind of work. In this article, I want to cover how to elegantly handle these requests.

How To Handle Requests Like This

Ask For Details About The Exercise

There is a fine line between ethical and unethical design exercises. You want to make sure you keep calm and ask for more clarification around the design exercise and what it entails before deciding.

An ethical design exercise:

• Takes less than a day to complete