February 2025
Service Design
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In June of 2022, I interviewed with a major US airline for a generalist ‘User Experience Designer’ role. After the second-round interview, I was given a ‘take-home exercise’ to complete; in all likelihood, it was most likely a chance to show competency with design thinking, and craft/execution (proficiency with tools). At the time, I didn’t realize that design exercises are pretty frowned upon, especially when given a company-specific problem to solve. As Tanner Christensen writes in his book “A Designer’s Guide to Interviewing,”
“Despite their increasing popularity within companies, the general opinion designers have of at-home exercises is overwhelmingly negative. When companies task designers with conducting unpaid work, on their own time, with no guarantee of a beneficial outcome, it is often seen as unfair and inequitable.”
He cites an article entitled “Design Exercises are a Bad Interviewing Practice” which lists reasons why they are seen as bad practice: (Article)
Key among the points is: take-home exercises are artificial constructs that don’t reflect how design actually happens.
At the time, I didn’t realize there was such controversy in the design world around candidate exercises, especially take-home exercises that directly pertained to the company a candidate was interviewing for. Essentially I was given what many argue is the most frowned upon scenario.
Since I was genuinely excited about the prospect of working for this company, I jumped at the opportunity to executive my first design challenge interview exercise!
Shortly after the second-round interview ended, I received the prompt in my inbox. I was told to “complete the exercise within 24 hours.”
As a general rule of thumb, most agree to spend between 4-8 hours on a take-home exercise regardless of how long you are given to complete it. Since I only had 24 hours to submit my final product, I decided to just spend as many business hours on it as possible.
Background: [Airline] uses a manual sign-in process using a paper log to check employees and visitors into a restricted area where dangerous chemicals are stored. In the current process, employees enter their names, employee IDs, check-in and check-out time, and visitor name in the paper log. This check-in information is used to determine if someone is in the restricted area during emergencies.
Goal: We need to propose a digital solution to track entries in this secure area.
Deliverable: Develop a presentation, no more than three slides. The proposal should include:
1. A rapid prototype to digitize the manual check-in process
2. A dashboard displaying the data collected
Since I didn't have much information to go on, I had to make assumptions.
1) What type of information is associated with the [company] Employee ID?
2) Could the [company] Employee ID be used in lieu of entering first/last name? Is it a physical/scannable card?
3) What types of visitors accompany employees? Do they always have to be accompanied by a [company] employee?
4) What types of technology does [company] already use that could be adapted to this scenario? Tablets/scanners?
5) Will there be any employee oversight/monitoring or will the system be self-serve?
6) Does the [company] Employee ID have building access associated with it?
7) What types of building access mechanisms already exist at [company]?
8) Is any compliance disclaimer provided to visitors of the storage area? (Ex. “I accept the risks of entering the site and am wearing appropriate PPE”)
9) Do visitors tend to be recurring? Is there a way to setup temporary and specific [company] IDs for them?
10) Who will have access to the records/information gathered from this system? Will it appear on any kind of employee intranet?
11) In all likelihood, the site already has an emergency response call-box (in accordance with waste storage regulations). Does this application need to have a back-up for contacting emergency services?
12) Are employees allowed to enter facility without signing in? Is the sign-in station inside or outside of the facility?
13) Does [company] possess any bio authentication tools such as fingerprint-driven time clocks?
1) Going paperless: aids in reliability and longevity of record-keeping
2) Time saved: current system requires users to fill out 5 pieces of information by hand
3) Safety: In case of emergency, workers on-site will know if employees are present in facility
1) Employee: aiding in site inspection, depositing waste at facility
2) Administrative: users inputting old records, auditing visitations
3) Guests: waste compliance specialists, waste removal specialists/contractors
Physical location: warehouse, likely to have few people around, time is important when accompanied by visitors, probably not climate-controlled: super hot in the Summer and cold in the Winter (going to want to keep the process brief), needs to be reliable (manual override will be needed)
After listing out a few ideas, ranking them on an impact/matrix, I opted to build: a tablet-oriented model with the possibility of having an associated ID scanner of some sort.
After brainstorming, I decided to map out what the basic process would look like digitally:
Prior to getting this interview, I decided to visually re-design the airline's mobile application as a side project. Their design language and conventions were still fresh in my mind but I still spent some time clicking through their website to get more information.
1) Utilizes employee ID as a means of sign-in; this saves users from having to type in names. Ideally, this could be a simple ID scanning process
2) Optional visitor information; optional to add multiple visitors at a time
3) Time and data are automatically recorded via system data to save time
1) Sign-In to view building access history and associated data: ideally this capability could be given to specific employees via their employee ID
2) Shows number of person(s) on-site; this status indicator appears at the bottom of the screen on all other screens
1) Users select the cluster associated with their name and sign out
*For the sake of brevity, I excluded the employee ID entry from this step
I really enjoyed being given the chance to show my technical skills as well as how I approach problem-solving. Unfortunately, I did not end up receiving a job offer for this role. After I submitted my materials, I received a phone call about a week later saying they had moved on with another candidate. I was pretty devastated but wanted to learn from the experience so that I could more effectively navigate the interview process in the future.
I’m writing this about a year later (August, 2023) and now know a lot more about the design interview process and design challenges in general. If I were given this same challenge now, I would do a few things differently:
1) Ask more questions (I was afraid this would reflect poorly at the time) to identify constraints
2) Ask what they’re looking to assess: product thinking vs. showing technical skills
3) Ask about a design system: this would save a great deal of time and also produce a higher quality prototype
The materials presented in this post have been iterated slightly but still represent what I submitted for the design challenge.
