Design exercise - a trick?

Careers & Mentoring
#1

Hi guys

I’m inited for a final stage interview next week with a company that I’d like to work for. They gave me a design exercise to work on and present. This is for a Senior position.

This is tricky because the feature that I have to redesign during the exercise is working as it should. If this would be real life, and “some users told us this doesn’t work so well”, I would go out there, test it, and prove that it works just fine. And my gut tells me to do the same for the interview, by putting together a mock user testing session and concluding that the feature works fine.

However, what I’m afraid of is that they expect deliverables (which they do according to the exercise description), and won’t accept my solution. I’m afraid it will look like I’m lazy and I didn’t want to do it (which clearly is not true). But this is what I’d do in real life, if I would meet this situation during my day-to-day job.

What would you advise me to do?

Thank you!

#2

I would say do both. Go with your instinct and user test it. Show them how you would go about convincing a client that no changes are necessary. But have some design changes in your back pocket. You can end with examples of what you could do if certain problems were actually there.

Good luck!

2 Likes
#3

I’m with @moshner on this one.

I’d go with your instinct and treat it as you would if you worked for them, but have something that demonstrates your process and thinking.

1 Like
#4

Hi @christianvasile!t

I would love to help you, but there are a couple of things missing from your post. The job title you are going for (you mentioned it’s a design exercise, but then you are talking about testing). The actual brief. Atm it’s hard to say and I don’t want to guess.

Instincts/gut are OK, but validating or invalidating the problem is a user researcher task, no self bias for that :slight_smile:

Warmly
Louise

#5

The interview is for a Senior UX Designer position, sorry for not mentioning that.

Regarding the brief, as you can imagine, I can’t share much of it. But it is a very short document (a couple of paragraphs) in which they have asked me to take a look at how one of the features in their software works, as “they have recently heard from some users that they are struggling with it”.

That’s it. So the brief is very short and open to interpretation I believe. With no research from their side, I would have to make my own - which is what I plan to do by user testing.

#6

Hi @christianvasile,

Yes, it sounds like a heuristic analysis would do for now.
Would love to hear how you get on. Do share :slight_smile:
Thanks, Louise