Solving Product Design Exercises

• Product Design career path as described by Julie Zhuo (VP of PD at Facebook)

  1. Craft & Execution—sharpening the basics of design, mastering the tools, getting better at designing clear and visually aesthetic interfaces.

  2. Product Thinking—Julie puts it this way: “Strong product thinking means that you understand what a good outcome is and how to design an experience that would lead to those good outcomes.”

  3. Influencing Skills—clear communication, effective collaboration.

• Reasons why designers cannot progress in their careers

  1. Dribbblisation of Design

  2. Lack of communication between businesses and the design community

  3. Different expectations of the role of ‘Product Designer’

  4. Lack of educational resources

Why should you read this book?

• Entry-level designers

  • Learn and practice skills that are required by the top companies.

  • Prepare for your first job interviews.

  • Find tasks for building a better portfolio to become more appealing to employers.

• Mid-level and senior designers

  • Improve product thinking and progress in your career.

  • Learn to interview other designers.

  • Prepare for the next job interview.

• Anyone making a career shift to product design

  • Learn more about the role and practice appropriate skills.

  • Find tasks for your first portfolio.

  • Prepare for your job interview.

• Business leaders

  • Learn how to interview your first design hire.

  • Understand the mindset of the most successful designers so as to better define the design role at your organisation.

• Other professionals (product managers, engineers, data scientists etc.)

  • Learn to ask the right questions to make better product decisions.

  • Learn to collaborate with designers more efficiently by understanding how they think.

The interview process

• The process is different at every company, but here is the general structure that most of them use for hiring product designers:

  1. Phone screening

  2. An on-site or phone interview

  3. Portfolio review

  4. Product/ Design critique (Opt)

  5. A design exercise

  6. Informal interview (Opt)

  7. Offer

Design exercise

• What is a design exercise?

  • Live whiteboarding (15-40 min, on-site)

  • On-site exercise (1h, 10-15min presentation and Q& A)

  • Take-home exercise (8h-week)

• Tasks that candidates are asked to perform

  1. Build a new product.

  2. Change or improve an existing product.

  3. Conceptual tasks (rarely asked)

  4. Business metric-oriented tasks (rarely asked)

• Why do companies use design exercises?

  • “It’s such a good technique because there’s no faking (like showing portfolio work from a big team effort),”

  • Performing a design exercise tests a designer’s skills in an environment as close as possible to the real job, given limited time and resources. In addition, it’s a good technique for testing entry-level designers without much prior work or when their previous work is confidential.

  • Candidates aren’t judged solely by the final result. The goal of exercises is to understand how the candidate approaches the problem, what their process is and how they work with the team.

• On-site exercises are a great tool to test candidate’s other abilities such as:

  • Communicating

  • Thinking critically

  • Handling feedback

  • Performing in a high-pressure

  • Being the kind of person the team would like to collaborate with

• How to solve a product design exercise

  • Make sure you understand the task

  • Ask questions and make assumptions

  • Be critical about your solutions

• Great designers don’t just receive a task and quietly implement it. One of the most important skills of great designers is asking the right questions and making sure they have all the information needed to build the right product for the right audience. Make sure you understand the task and your goal clearly; why this product should exist, who you’re building the product for, and what their needs are.

• Always be aware of the “why” behind your design decisions and be ready to explain them. There are no perfect solutions and your ability to talk about its pros and cons is both important for you and for the interviewer. It will demonstrate your ability to think critically and make you less attached to your ideas and less defensive about them while presenting. In both your actual job and in interviews, this awareness will lead to a better outcome.

• Answer structure - “Five Ws and How” (5W1H)

  • Why am I building this?

  • Who am I building it for?

  • When and where will it be used?

  • What am I building?

  • How could I measure it?

• 5W1H is a technique used in journalism, research and police investigations for information gathering and problem solving. It is also used in product building:

The framework

• Step 1: Understand your goal (Why)

• Step 2: Define the audience (Who)

• Step 3: Understand the customer’s context and need…

• Step 4: List ideas (What)

• Step 5: Prioritise and choose an idea

• Step 6: Solve

• Step 7: Measure success (How)

Step 1: Understand your goal (Why)

• Building a new product

  • Why is this product or feature important?

  • What problem are we trying to solve?

  • What impact does it have on the world?

  • How does this product benefit customers?

  • What business opportunity does it create?

• Improving an existing product

  • Think about the vision, the “why” of the company and how your improvement supports it.

Step 2: Define the audience (Who)

• Choose the audience

• Describe the audience

Step 3: Understand the customer’s context and need…

• List the context and conditions (When & Where)

  • Where are they physically?

  • Is there a trigger event causing this need?

  • How much time do they have?

  • Are they on a specific digital app or platform?

  • What emotions do they experience?

• List the audience’s needs

  • To do that we should ask “what is the customer’s high-level motivation for solving the problem we’re tackling?”

  • Look at the high-level motivation we defined and ask yourself “how could they achieve that?”

• The ‘user stories’ technique

  • As a < role >, I want < goal/ desire > so that < benefit >

• Identifying the problems

Step 4: List ideas (What)

• Now is the time to explore what the company could build to fulfill the customer’s needs defined in the previous step. List three or four possible products. Use these properties to help generate different ideas:

  • Type of product

  • Platform

  • Type of interface

• Build X for < Who / Step 2 >, that < When and Where / Step 3 > to < Why / Step 1 >.

Step 5: Prioritise and choose an idea

• During this step, we want to evaluate all of them. Here are four considerations that will help you to weigh up each idea:

  • Reach

  • Value for customer

  • Potential revenue

  • Implementation effort

• To make it a little bit easier, use an effort / impact matrix. Place each solution on a graph with two axes: impact (combination of reach, value, revenue) and effort.

Step 6: Solve

• If you’re working on an on-site exercise, the deliverables of this step are:

  • Wireframe flows

  • User journeys

  • A list of ideas

  • Sketches of any kind.

• For take-home exercise, the final deliverables would be high-fidelity designs,

• Here are three techniques – storyboarding, defining tasks and speedy sketching – that will help you kick off the design of the product:

  • Storyboarding - In this technique, you should map out the customer’s journey to get a picture of what interactions your product needs to support. Exploring these interactions will start giving you some ideas for the interface.

  • Defining tasks - This is probably the quickest and most efficient technique to kick off designing your interface. It is similar to storyboarding, but where storyboarding is linear and covers only one main flow, defining tasks allows you to think about different flows. Make a list of tasks the customer needs to be able to complete to use your product successfully.

  • Speedy sketching - If you’re doing a take-home exercise and you have enough time, or you’re feeling stuck, try this. Fold a sheet of paper in four sections. Take one minute or less to sketch a possible interface for the product you’re trying to design—one solution per section. The sketches shouldn’t be perfect, but as unique as possible. If you feel that you have more ideas, turn over the sheet and keep sketching. The goal of this technique is to challenge your mind to come up with more than just the first and most obvious solution and to generate a range of ideas that you can pick from or combine.

Step 7: Measure success (How)

• Here are some example metrics you could use to measure the success of your design:

  • Task success rate

  • Task completion time

  • Engagement

  • Retention

  • Revenue

  • Conversion

  • User acquisition

  • Net promoter score (NPS)

**How much time should you spend on each step?**

• Step 1: Understand your goal (Why)—3min

• Step 2: Define the audience (Who)—5min

• Step 3: Understand customer’s context (When/ Where) and needs—5min

• Step 4: List ideas (What)—5min

• Step 5: Prioritize and choose an idea—3min

• Step 6: Solve—30min

• Step 7: Measure—3min

• Review and prepare for the presentation—5min

• Total: 59min

• Depending on the task, you’ll have the answers to some steps already provided. If this is the case, use this time for the solution step, which should take at least 50% of the overall time.

How to use a design exercise when interviewing

• Take-home exercise — For junior positions, you want to test a candidate’s visual skills and ability to produce deliverables, ready for development, using appropriate tools. For this purpose, you can use a take-home exercise with a deadline of two to seven days, making sure the candidate is aware that you’ll send them the task with this deadline. A general guideline is to spend four to eight hours in total on the task.

• On-site exercise — To test the candidate’s product thinking you could either use a live whiteboarding session or give the candidate time to think about the solution in a quiet room for an hour and present their ideas afterwards.

• Here are some useful questions to ask yourself about the candidate during and after the interview to help summarise their evaluation:

  • Do they ask questions?

  • Can they take feedback well?

  • Do they communicate clearly?

  • Are they easy to talk to?

  • Do they follow a process or jump straight to the solution?

  • Have they made valid assumptions?

  • Do they talk about how their solution connects to the company’s mission?

  • Do they think about the target audience?

  • Do they relate to the users’ context and define their needs?

  • How do they decide which solution is the best?

  • Do they talk about both the strong and weak sides of their solutions?

  • Are they exploring solutions beyond the obvious ones?

  • Do they set goals for measuring the success of the product and their design?

• How to come up with an idea for a task

  • Look for a market opportunity.

  • Find problems that need to be solved.

  • Look at established companies’ business needs.

• Why companies shouldn’t use tasks based on their own products

  • The interviewer is going to have so much more context and knowledge about this problem than the candidate, making it very hard for them to approach its result objectively.

  • The interviewer will be swayed by their own thinking on the product.

  • It’s ethically wrong.

Bobby Ghoshal: how designers should change their mindset

• The mindset change from being a “user experience designer” to a “customer experience designer” may seem small, it isn’t. It will change how your company sees you, how your customers see your company, it will yield a higher value transfer to both your company and the customer and is the surest way to get massive business buy-in for precious company money to get re-invested into design.

Justin Maxwell: advice for designers who want to become founders

• There are 1,000 things, but ultimately they roll up to three main categories: discipline, people skills, and big-picture thinking.

Joel Califa: two tips for getting a job

• The main piece of advice I usually give is to treat getting a job like you would a design process. You are the product and the hiring manager is the user. You want them to have a great experience and to buy what you’re selling. That means they very quickly need to understand who you are, what you can do for them, and decide that it lines up with what they need.

Mia Blume: skills which future design managers should work on

• One of the most important things for designers to embrace when shifting to management is learning to let go of control and become a coach.

• A few tips to get started:

  • Stay focused on listening.

  • Ask good questions that flip the problem solving back on your teammate,

  • If you don’t have to make a decision or direct a solution (e.g. high risk project or tight deadline), empower them to solve it themselves.

  • If they ask for your opinion, offer it, but empower them to make the decision with the best information at hand.