Why you should say no to UX take-home exercises
Speculative work, or take-home assignment — is still prevalent in many design, advertising, and communication industries. Spec work is a controversial concept, and the glorious and maddening industry I happen to work in suffers from the delusion that take-home assignments are a good way to assess candidates. Here’s why spec work is a poor way of understanding how candidates will perform in a job.
Design work for free
Imagine contacting a carpenter and saying “Look, I see you’re skilled at fixing chairs, but our chairs are unique. Come over and just fix one, and if we like it, we’ll talk about a contract.” You’d get smacked with a hammer for even suggesting it! Nobody in skilled trades works in this manner, so why do we hold designers to a different standard?
Take-home tasks are fundamentally flawed because there are companies exploiting people with the “solve my problem for free, and I’ll hire you if I like your idea” mindset. I’ll give you three reasons to why this is appalling:
- It is uncompensated labour, and by definition, unfair.
- It is not backed by real research or data.
- If it is the company’s niche problem, it can’t be shared on a portfolio or blog.
Design is not engineering
While on paper, it sounds great, but that’s far from reality. I imagine take-home assignments emerged as a practice since coding challenges were the norm in software engineering. The thing is, coding challenges are way more direct than design challenges. There are objectively better ways to solve engineering problems where the outcome is predetermined.
UX design had to overcome its perception of just being about visual design by demonstrating rigour, data and science. Unfortunately, the same is not at all true for design. There are numerous approaches to a problem that requires testing and iteration to get to anything like a good solution.
Good design requires collaboration
Any good designer worth their salt knows that collaboration is necessary for quality outcomes. Good design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The design process takes time, with plenty of conversations between multiple stakeholders and many hours of research and fine-tuning to produce something “delightful”.
Take-home exercises are a one-way, one-time process that forces designers to utilise their creative talents for free, often with nothing more than a short design brief and a promise of a job.
That’s like asking a nutritionist to cook a ‘healthy meal’ in an interview. You’re not really changing someone’s diet, learning about them and suited to their day-to-day needs; you’re getting a free meal.
Take-home assignments tell you they don’t trust your portfolio
One of the more alarming aspects of take-home challenges is the lack of trust. Trust is essential to all working relationships — to ALL relationships.
Take-home exercises tell designers right off the bat that their portfolios, case-studies, qualifications, and testimonials aren’t enough and that they have to prove themselves further by working on an assignment.
A good designer needs to be able to understand the nuances for the people using their products and blend qualitative insights with analytics data. No take-home assignment can ever give you a complete picture of the full range of skills in a designer’s arsenal. If you want to learn what specific parts the designer worked on, the responsibilities they took up, the impact they had on the business — you need to learn to probe better. Giving them a take-home assignment isn’t the answer.
Take-home isn’t inclusive for people with obligations
What really grates my cheese about take-home assignments are that they don’t reflect how real-world products are built. Plus, they are super unfair to specific demographics. Young people with free time and some financial stability will be able to put a lot more effort on the assignment that the expected “4–6 hours” than, let’s say, a single parent whose time at home is focused on their children, and can only spend time on it after the kids are asleep and when they’re likely exhausted.
The average UX designer interviews at 6–12 companies before being hired. One of the most painful parts I and some of the designers I’ve spoken to experience is when one is interviewing at different companies concurrently and all the companies expect you to do one of these dreaded assignments. More recently, I’ve noticed some companies offering to pay people for a week while they do a take-home exercise. While this is slightly better than not paying candidates at all, it still is a terrible practice if you care about hiring a diverse group of individuals in your team. Some of the best designers I know point-blank reject take-home assignments which also means you’re losing out on a talented pool of designers too.
How do we hire Product Designers?
At ReferralCandy, we understand that all designers don’t solve problems in the same way. Some designers take in a lot of data, go off into a cave, fiddle on it for a while, and then come out with something great. Others iterate and prototype almost right from the kick-off, uncovering solutions through refinement. Some require thinking out loud, and collaboration to do their best work. A good organization has people with a variety of problem-solving approaches, which enables the organization to better tackle a wide array of challenges.
Design exercises are typically time-boxed, and candidates are asked to solve a problem on the spot under the scrutiny of others. The nature of these exercises already favours a narrow range of problem-solving technique. A take-home exercise, by its very nature, is inclined towards superficial solutions, and biases teams towards visual designers. There’s not really any room for depth.
Our ideal hiring process is unbiased, thoughtful and most importantly, human. Candidates are evaluated on their experience and portfolio. For us to get a deeper sense of candidates and their working styles, we speak to a few people the candidate has worked with. All candidates answer a questionnaire, talk to a few people on the team, walk us through an in-depth presentation of their work and collaborate on a whiteboarding exercise. While this seems like a lot of interview rounds to go through, we are intentional about our process to get a varied perspective from the various interviewers. To keep this process unbiased, only the hiring manager is privy to the feedback — not any of the team members
1. Portfolio review
In a portfolio review candidates typically first walk us through a few projects in detail. We are a curious bunch and love learning about your approach, intentionality, and overall design awareness.
What we hope to see in a portfolio
- Show us 2–3 of your best work — be engaging! Which projects make you giddy with excitement? Pixel-perfect projects are great and abundant on Dribbble, but a project that shows you learned something tells us that you are able to reflect and want to grow.
- Your problem solving and user-centric approach during the product cycle.
- A well-framed story: What was the problem, what were the considerations and how you arrived at your final decision.
- Talk about what research or data-informed your design decisions.
- Describe your role on each project: how you contributed individually, how you led your team and how you worked cross-functionally with other teams.
- Dig into details: Show us prototypes, wireframes, sketches, ideas — you will be speaking with product designers who like to see the whole gamut from concept through to ship.
- Describe how you quantified success during this project, how you tested it before it reached its final form.
- Reflect on what worked and what didn’t and what you would / could have done differently.
2. Whiteboarding exercise
After the portfolio review, our team of designers work on a whiteboarding exercise with the candidate for an hour as we tackle a specific problem.
What we hope to see in a whiteboard exercise
- Problem definition — how do you explore the problem space and identify big problems to go after?
- Solution space — how comfortable are you with generating multiple ideas without being married to an idea and figure out the best one to develop further?
- Design knowledge — how well can you make trade-offs between platforms, global and local interaction patterns?
- Collaboration — how well do you work with your teammates by responding to their prompts and getting them interested in the approach that you’re taking?
What makes our whiteboard exercise different
- We send candidates an email a few days before the whiteboarding exercise where we outline the objective and the signals we’re looking for. This gives every candidate a fair understanding of the things to focus on during the exercise.
- The design prompt is very different from what ReferralCandy does as a business. If any company gives you an exercise that is suspiciously similar to their business model or even blatantly asks you to redesign their product, they’re trying to get you to work for free.
- Our team members collaborate with the candidate during the challenge, and apart from the hiring manager, no one else knows what the exercise is ahead of time. This is because we don’t want any team member to have an unfair advantage, and no exercise is recycled and used again.
- One of the designers acts as a co-lead because we want to see how the candidate collaborates with a team, in the real world. The co-lead helps candidates bounce ideas, give feedback and plan their time wisely.
- Other designers roleplay various roles to learn how candidates respond to new learnings, constraints and treat both users & internal stakeholders.
- All team members evaluate candidates based on a written, measurable rubric.
Hiring managers, if you’ve been giving designers take-home assignments without realizing the weight of your requests, stop! All is forgiven — go forth and mindfully treat designers with care and consideration. To those of you who have been deliberately giving out take-home assignments as an easy way to generate ideas — shame on you. You are perpetuating an ugly cycle of free labour, cheapening the very industry you’re working in, and likely losing out on good candidates along the way.
Dear designers, interviewing can be a nervous, stressful time filled with moments of insecurities and struggling with rejections and self-doubt. Remember that interviewing is part of the journey. Hold your head high and stand your ground against spec work! 💪
We’re looking to add software engineers to our amazing team! Apply on Angel.co and share with your favourite engineers! ❤️
