The interview process for a job in user experience design is already difficult. Add to it the strain of finishing a take-home design challenge in under six hours during the middle of the week. Or, much worse, having to perform in front of the whole panel while being interviewed on a whiteboard.
However, it does not have to be quite so terrifying. What steps can you take to alleviate some of your fear? Practice. Your worst nightmares aren’t true; the UX design issues you’ll face in the design process aren’t supposed to scare you. They were developed to assist companies in evaluating the method that candidates use to solve design difficulties.
The problem of user experience design is all about how you go about doing things. There is no right response to the problem, thus no one expects a great answer. They anticipate that you will demonstrate how you intend to tackle the issue.
There is a method to the madness which is the design challenge phase of the interview process. Recruiters will read the design challenge to evaluate how you deal with problems you don’t know much about, how you go about solving them, and whether or not you’re a good match for the company’s culture. The design challenge you’ll face during the interview process is meant to be a practice run for the actual work you’ll be doing if you get hired by the organization.
Are you prepared to carry out the drills? To begin, let’s have a conversation about the obstacles that lie ahead for you in a challenge. After that, we will go through several examples so that you will be more prepared on the day of your major challenge.
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What is a UX Design Challenge?
Employers use what is called a “Design Challenge” to evaluate candidates’ ability to solve design challenges, and taking part in one is a great opportunity to put your talents to the test. After you have finished the Portfolio Review, this normally occurs around the end of the interview near the conclusion of the process. Generally speaking, an employer might ask you to find solutions to one of two distinct kinds of Design Challenges.
Also read: How to Become a UI/UX Designer?
2 Types of UX Design Challenges
There are two types of design challenges:
1) White Board Challenge
A Whiteboard design challenge is a type of design task often conducted during an interview. This kind of test will provide you the opportunity to work together with the designers who are interviewing you and to exhibit your capacity to find solutions to problems. The time allotment for whiteboard exercises is typically thirty minutes. Sometimes, you’ll have one hour to finish your assignment.
These are carried out in the presence of the interview committee. Whenever you participate in a whiteboard challenge, the people conducting the interview will provide you with a quick prompt. After that, you will enlighten them on your procedure.
Whiteboard interviews provide candidates the opportunity to work together with the interview panel, who will frequently become their work colleagues if they are recruited. In addition to this, customers are able to observe your method of design in action in real-time.
2) Take-Home Challenge
Take-home design challenges are typically completed by participants in their own homes, hence the name “take-home.” Employers will often assign “take-home” design tasks so that you have more time to go more deeply into the issue and come up with a solution that covers all aspects of the problem.
The person conducting the interview will provide you with a brief assignment. A take-home assignment will typically give you around one week to complete it. The majority of businesses will provide you with an anticipated amount of time to finish the task. The time needed to complete your take-home evaluation might range anywhere from three to six hours. On the other hand, a take-home assignment can end up taking far more time than the organization anticipated.
Examples of UX Design Whiteboard Challenges
1) Bank Chatbot
“You have been promoted to the position of design director at a major national bank. The bank you work for wants to have a chatbot-enabled app ready to release as soon as possible. How do you propose to tackle the difficult task of giving information in response to a number of requests?”
2) Reception Area for the Lifts
“Our elevators operate flawlessly, but with over 2,500 people using them daily, we need a more efficient way to direct everyone to the correct elevator.”
3) Reduce Your Costco Checkout Time
“Getting rid of the long checkout lines is a top priority as we work to enhance the shopping experience for our customers. We’ve come to the conclusion that a self-checkout system is the best option, albeit we’d like to improve upon the standard system used in grocery shops. According to our findings, their checkout times are much longer than those of standard lanes.”
Also Read : How to Hire dedicated development team
4) Time Machine
“We have developed an application that can quickly be installed on any smart device, such as a smartwatch or a smartphone. It grants you the ability to visit any point in time, both in the past and the future. However, the design of the user interface (UI) is proving difficult for us.”
5) Virtual Fitting Try on
“To find a pair of jeans or other form-fitting clothing on the internet may be a time-consuming and stressful experience. Comparing the various types is challenging, as is determining with absolute certainty how they will each fit. Returning an item because it doesn’t fit properly is a frustrating ordeal. How can you assist clients in selecting the proper size and type of jeans to meet their needs?”
6) Pet Surveillance
“Despite our best intentions, we have to leave our dogs at home when we go to work, go on vacation, or run errands. How can pet owners communicate with their animals when they are not at home?”
7) GPS Tracker For Cars
“We have almost 15,000 employees, and our main campus is filled to capacity with all of their automobiles. There has been an issue with employees ‘losing’ their automobiles in the parking lot. They have no idea in which of the five enormous parking lots they parked, so they are lost and roaming about clicking the door alarms on their cars in an attempt to find them. The conclusion of the day is marked by appalling levels of noise pollution. There is already an app for workplace use. We wish to include a function that will assist staff in locating their vehicles.”
8) Fees For Subscription
“It’s difficult to maintain tabs on the many monthly subscriptions we have. All we see is money being taken out of our accounts, sometimes for services that we do not use anymore. What are some ways that a product that helps manage subscriptions may be designed? ”
9) Invoices
“When you manage your own business as a freelancer, one of the design challenges you have is managing multiple clients and tasks at once. However, there are situations when customers do not pay on the agreed-upon schedule. How can you assist owners of freelancing businesses in keeping track of payments received from their customers and ensuring that they get payments from customers in a timely manner for each project?”
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10) App for children
“We are a custom toy company, and we are interested in developing an app that will allow children to create their own toys.”
Examples of UX Design Take-Home Challenges
1) Gym Check-Out
“We developed a mobile application for finding fitness classes. At this time, consumers are just able to browse through available fitness classes; they cannot buy them. If we want to earn money off of this app, we need to implement a system where customers can buy individual lessons directly from the app. Please devise a comprehensive purchasing system for our fitness center locator app.”
2) The Cleaning Staff’s App
“We designed an app to assist janitors in performing their jobs more efficiently. It has an area for them to submit a floorplan map of their workspace, a cleaning schedule chart, and a supply inventory log. Your job is to come up with a single view that may be used in the mapping component details of the program.”
3) Voice Assistant for SmartHome
“Imagine that Voice Assistance is interested in learning how caregivers communicate with the various smart home gadgets in order to stay in contact with their patients and provide assistance to them. To this point, the research has primarily focused on the perspective of the user of the gadget, as opposed to the experience that caregivers have. The group hopes that they will be able to share the findings within the next month.”
4) ProPhoto
The present smartphone app for ProPhoto only allows users to see their own camera’s images, edit those photos, and view the photos of other users from across the world. In contrast to the revolutionary nature of this camera, this software fails to push the limits of what is possible.
As the person in charge of producing a new smartphone app that ProPhoto Corp. hopes would appeal to Generation Z, you’ll need to make it distinct from the current picture ecosystem (Instagram, VSCO, and Snapchat). In what ways would you describe the ideal app as innovative?
Due to the nature of the app’s target platform (iOS), any proposed solutions must already exist or be commercially accessible within the next year.
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5) Roomies
“Make it easy and secure for millennials to locate the perfect roommate in the USA by designing a mobile app experience that speaks to this demographic. Think about the design process from the point of view of both the apartment seeker and the roommate seeker while designing the interface. How else can this product improve the roommate experience after the perfect match has been made?
We want you to pinpoint challenging aspects of the UX process of “finding/keeping a decent roommate” and come up with potential solutions to those challenging aspects of the process.
Constraint: Rely solely on the presently available mobile features of the iOS and Android operating systems.”
6) Website For Comparing Prices For Educators
“In an effort to assist instructors in lowering their overall supply costs, we have developed a website that compares prices of various products. It’s not fair that teachers have to pay out of their own pockets for school materials, therefore we’d like to assist them in finding the greatest prices we can. It is up to you to devise a list view that can be sorted for our website.”
7) Consultant at Google
“You are advising Google on a key strategic issue for their corporate services; they want to know if it is worthwhile to include a sales funnel management tool into their Enterprise Gmail interface,” Google argues that it can streamline the sales process and increase the chance of completing business since the vast majority of its enterprise users use its email platform to talk business and because it is the vocabulary of most people’s business connections.
40% of Google Enterprise users utilize funnel management, and 26% sell weekly.
Leads, Inquiries, Prospects, Quotes, and Customers are typical sales funnel stages.
Advise Google on funnel management. Make sure the flow allows a Gmail user to contact a lead and manage it via the funnel. What more can Gmail do to improve its users’ likelihood of closing business?
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8) Landing Page
“To assist podcast producers in generating residual revenue through the sale of merchandise that advertises their program, our drop shipping firm developed an artificial intelligence-powered shipping and logistics software. We need you to create the landing page for our podcaster shipping and logistics software driven by artificial intelligence.”
9) App for Restaurant Recommendations
“The configuration choices for our app that makes restaurant suggestions are undergoing a complete overhaul. Users have expressed their frustration that they are receiving an excessive number of alerts, that they are unable to customize their suggestions to a sufficient degree, and that it is difficult to adjust the settings. Please include settings view to our app so that foodies may more easily locate restaurants that suit their tastes. You need to provide the place, the notification, the many possibilities for foreign food, and any dietary requirements.”
10) Ecommerce Store
“Consider new strategies for upselling products in an online business while minimizing the impact on the user’s experience of the checkout process.”
Also read: Top Guide On eCommerce Mobile App Development
Getting Ready for a Design Challenge
Design challenges is nerve-wracking! Preparing for this stage of the UX interview might soothe your anxieties and make it simpler.
1) Create A Game
Make 15–30-minute design flashcards with many designer buddies. Take your card to the whiteboard! Maintain the time limit.
2) Explore Glassdoor
Before your interview, look up the firm on Glassdoor to see what design problems they usually provide candidates with.
3) Design Challenge Creators
Two ex-Google designers created Sharpen, a free app that generates design challenges. Another free resource that might help you prepare for design difficulties and get some ideas rolling is Designercize.
Where can you get UX design practice tasks?
Take-home and whiteboard tasks are hard to locate. These four sites provide free practice assignments. This blog post cites these sources. These sources include more thorough design challenge examples.
You can find good examples prompts at:
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Additional reading: A Successful Guide On Outsourcing Software Development
Final Words
This is your chance to put your newfound instructions to use. Create a blueprint for all your issues and practice out loud. Be honest and open.
Most design difficulties will involve your target company. UX designers may have encountered these issues in the past, or they may have been sparked by the work they are doing at the moment. They help employers assess your design thinking.
Design challenges on a whiteboard or to take home can demonstrate to potential employers that you excel in five key areas. You must demonstrate team communication skills. They want you to question and think critically. You’ll also be tested on how effectively you’ll work with the team.
They’ll test your character. To test your feedback skills, future employers will offer constructive comments. They’re assessing your ability to solve a new design challenge on a deadline. Practice makes perfect!
FAQs
What is a UX design challenge?
List some good UX Design challenges you should tackle. Take-home design challenges typically are done in the home – this makes it “take-home”. Employers give you design challenges to go on your own and give you time to look deeper and develop your own solutions. When interviewed, your interviewer gives you the opportunity to do something.
Why is UX design so difficult?
Good UX requires two very different skills: a thorough knowledge of the machine. The people here are concerned first with software and the other is people. Our team is highly qualified in their area.
