Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Artiom Dashinsky

Use these exercises to practice your product-thinking skills and learn how we test our design candidates.

The design community is lucky to have so many great resources like Dribbble, Behance, Daily UI etc. These resources allow to see others visual work, show yours and get feedback. On the other hand, a saturated market of visual-centric design communities lead to Dribbblisation of Design — an obsession about how things look over how they work. This process created the wrong perception in the minds of many entry-level designers — that “Product Design = Dribbble”.

Entry-level designers should be working on their product thinking skill.

Career steps according to Julie Zhuo and her amazing piece The Beginning of your Design Career.

Today the best businesses understand that designers should play a role that is beyond aesthetics, making sure the company is building the right features for the right people. Unfortunately these businesses never communicated appropriately what kind of challenges they are expecting junior designers to be able to solve to get hired.

That, in addition to lack of resources where product thinking can be practiced, created a gap between the skills designers are working on to improve, and the skills best businesses expect them to have.

Comic credit: Andrew Hwang

How the design community can help

I believe that we, as a design community can do a better job in minimizing this gap, and as a result, have better prepared designers on the market and move the industry forward. Here are some ways we could help:

Designers:

Create resources for practicing product thinking.
Share the take-home design tasks you have been asked to perform during interviews. But be careful the things you share don’t reveal sensitive information about the company the task relates to.

Companies:

Create case studies to increase clarity to what kind of challenges product designers are dealing with at your company.
Provide better transparency on your hiring process, so junior designers can learn what kind of skills product designers are expected to be able to solve to get hired.

Taking the first step

Creative Leads of WeWork Digital design team: Stephanie Wu and Andrew Couldwell. Photo: Nina Robinson for Inside Design: WeWork.

Tech companies have slightly different approaches to interviewing for Product Designer positions. But all of them aim to check candidate’s product thinking. Facebook asks to do a design critique for a product, Google Ventures does a whiteboard exercise involving product thinking, with a heavy focus on interaction design.

At WeWork, part of our product designer interview process involves whiteboard exercises. We decided to share some of them to the community.

How you can use the exercises:

Designers can use them to practice their product thinking.
Entry level designers can use them to fill their portfolio (believe me, it’s better then another unsolicited redesign of Wikipedia).
Companies can use them in their hiring process.

Why are we doing whiteboard exercises?

In addition to testing product thinking, whiteboard exercises are a great tool to test candidate against abilities like:

Communicating effectively with the team.
Thinking critically and asking good questions.
Handling feedback / constructive criticism.
Performance in a high pressure environment on a new problem that has a looming deadline.
Whether this is the kind of person the team would like to collaborate with on a day-to-day basis.

Deliverables may include:

All of the exercises are performed on-site in our offices. Candidates are given 60 minutes, followed by a 15–20 minute presentation and discussion.

Exercises list

Here are 17 exercises you can use:

1. Roommates

A few trends of note: 54% of the world’s population live in urban communities, the average marriage age for men is 29 (up from 26 two decades ago) and for women is 27 (up from 23 in the same time period). Given these trends, city dwellers tend to spend most of their twenties living with roommates. Finding and keeping a good roommate, however, gets harder as more people swarm into cities.

Design a mobile product experience that appeals to millennials that makes it safe to find the ideal roommate in New York City. Design the experience from the perspective of person who is looking a roommate as well as the one who is looking for the apartment. Once the ideal roommate is found, what else can this product do to make the roommate experience better?

We are looking for you to identify pain points in the “finding/keeping a good roommate” journey and to find ways to solve for those pain points.

Constraint: Stick to existing mobile capabilities of iOS and Android.

2. GoPro needs a new app

GoPro’s insanely successful action-cam has a global footprint. The cost of the camera is now under $50.00 and millions of people are using it to document the adventurous side of their lives.

GoPro has a problem though, their current mobile app is only good for three things — to look at photos people have taken on their own cams, to edit those photos and to look at photos other people have taken around the world. For a camera that’s changing the world, this app is admittedly dull and doesn’t push the envelope.

GoPro Corp. has put you in charge of delivering a new mobile app, one that stands out from the photo environment today (instagram. Vsco cam and snapchat), one that will appeal to millennials. What does the perfect GoPro app do that’s new and groundbreaking?

Constraint: This is an iOS app, all suggested technologies need to be available on the market today or within the next 12 months.

3. Google Enterprise Sales Funnel

You are consulting Google on an important strategic decision for their enterprise offerings; they want to know whether it’s worth introducing a sales funnel management tool onto their Enterprise Gmail interface. Google believes that because a majority of their enterprise users discuss business on their email platform and because they are the lexicon of most people’s business contacts, that they are in a position to both make the sales process more efficient and make the likelihood of closing business higher.

26% of Google’s Enterprise users engage in sales weekly, 40% engage in some sort of funnel management (whether sales, hiring, or some other decision funnel).

A typical sales funnel includes Leads, Inquiries, Prospects, Quotes and finally a new customer.

Recommend a funnel management flow to Google. Make sure the flow accounts for a user making initial contact with a lead from within gmail and then managing that lead through the entire funnel. What else can gmail do to put the odds of closing business in favor of their user?

Constraint: No constraints

4. Business Passenger

Assume you live in a world where cars drive themselves. Design a door-to-door experience that allows four business executives to make the most out of a 4 hour journey from New York City to Baltimore on a weekday. They are on their way to a meeting with a new client.

Constraint: The only technological leap we are allowed to make is that all cars drive themselves. All other suggested technologies must exist today or could realistically exist within 6–12 months.

Assumptions: You can pick any type of business executive and any type of “new client.” Business executives are aged 28–45.

5. Spotify Artist Catalogue Manager

Spotify has decided to give artists control of their catalogues on their platform. For the first time, artists can manage their own albums, upload their own artwork, sell specific merchandise, add lyrics to their music etc. and it’s all on their own terms.

Design a Mac-based editor and artist management system that allows artists to manage their presence on Spotify. The solution should account for all existing artist content on Spotify but feel free to get creative and add additional features that an artist might find useful.

Constraint: You are designing a Mac desktop app, you will be relegated to the OS’s abilities but you can disregard any web-related technical constraints because they don’t apply here.

6. E-ink

The cost of e-ink is now $0.00. What interfaces can you innovate at home to make living our day-to-day lives more interesting? Come up with a comprehensive and well thought-out list, if you feel compelled to draw out a few example interfaces that might be difficult to explain without visuals, do so, but the list takes precedence.

Constraint: None

7. Crisis News Network

“Crisis News Network” or CNN is the largest syndicate of breaking news and other news worldwide. They focus on the millennial audience. They’ve hired you to rethink the news experience for their site (desktop).

Design a compelling news site for today’s generation of news consumers. Try and put your finger on how millennials consume and share content. CNN doesn’t want to be dogmatic about “how they’ve always done things.” They want to break new ground, they want this new site to take a few risks and they’re counting on you to bring change to the industry.

Design a homepage and a story page.

Constraint: Use existing web capabilities.

8. Personalising audiobooks

Audiobooks and podcasting are the fastest growing audio segments on mobile. Users who listen to audiobooks don’t enjoy the benefits of dog-earing pages, highlighting excerpts or leaving notes on their favorite pages… they also lose the nostalgic aspects of owning a book and watching it age. This leaves a lot to be desired from the audio experience on mobile.

Design an Audiobook or Podcasting mobile app that is highly personal, highly interactive and with the ability to bring even more utility to the user than a book ever could.

Constraint: All suggested technologies need to exist, or have the ability to realistically exist within the next 6 months.

9. Interact with specific audio sections in audiobooks

You’ve got an iPhone in your pocket, an Apple Watch on your hand, your headphones are on and a life-changing audiobook is playing into them. Design an interaction flow that allows a user to do one or more of the following:

– “Highlight” audio, analogous to highlighting text in a book. What else can the user do now that they’ve highlighted the content?

– Listen to the book with other listeners around the world. Share your emotions on the content with the other listeners.

– Take notes on parts of the audiobook you find interesting.

Constraint: Work within the technical limitations of the devices you have on you.

10. Calendar for a Traveling Salesman

Valentina leads sales and business development for a Fortune 500 company. She travels 3 out of 4 weeks in the month, and when she travels, it’s almost always internationally. Between all her travel to different timezones and a busy meeting schedule in different cities, she finds it challenging to keep up with her calendar to show up to the right places at the right time. Design a calendar flow and interface that is smart enough to suggest meeting times, accounts for changing time zones, and is proactively working for Valentina to make sure she is always on time for her meetings.

Constraint: Solution has to be mobile-friendly and has to use viable technologies from today.

11. Daily Food Intake

Gary is a Gen-Xer, still a young 30-something bachelor, college educated and accomplished in the tech field. On a recent trip to his general physician he was diagnosed with early signs of obesity. Design the lowest barrier to entry flow using any device(s) that makes Gary want to track his daily food intake and intervene when he shows signs of overeating. His life depends on it.

Constraint: All technologies/suggestions must be viable for use today.

12. Garbage

On average, a typical middle class American family wastes over 4M lbs of materials to keep up with their lifestyle. A majority of that is what they throw away or recycle on a daily basis.. How can Americans be more conscious about the waste they throw away?

Assume technology can play a role in helping here. Give the user an interface that can help them manage their waste disposal. Feel free to be a little imaginative with the potential of how hardware and software can coincide to solve the problem.

Constraint: Suggested technology should either exist today or should be viable for the market within 6 months.

13. NYC Metrocard

The NYC metrocard system has remained unchanged for decades. The cost of the metrocard machine infrastructure, the lost time of waiting in line to buy a metrocard, touching a dirty machine to do it, the potential of losing the metrocard, and the ease of gaming the system by swiping your card for others has cost the city millions of dollars and leaves much to be desired from the user experience.

Design a new system that allows a daily user who uses the metro everyday or an-out-of-town visitor who will use the metro just once to get access to the metro, on time, without having a physical NYC metrocard on hand.

Constraint: Every suggested technology has to be available on the market today.

Other exercises:

14. Choose an app that you like and use a lot, describe how you can redesign it and why.

15. Today, 54% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66% by 2050. Projections show that urbanization combined with the overall growth of the world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban populations by 2050. Think about a digital product that could help governments and municipalities dealing with this challenge.

16. Pets care is a $60 billion market. Think about a product that could capitalize on demand for this kind of services.

17. Pick a target user who you don’t feel is well served by Amazon.com. How would you redesign Amazon.com to appeal to that user type.

We’re hiring

WeWork is always looking for talented Product Designers to join our Digital team in New York. Drop me a line to hear more about how we change the way people work and live, and why you should be part of it.

Product Design Exercises We Use At WeWork Interviews was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Product Design Exercises We Use At WeWork Interviews

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