“designers who learn how to help companies to solve business problems will help us to build better products and, hopefully, solve the most urgent problems the world is facing today, making it more sustainable, healthy and equal.”

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What made me read this book?

Despite this book appearing frequently throughout my social media circles, I decided to read it for the exercise prompts. Artiom Dashinksy shares an entire chapter of sample product design exercise prompts toward the end of the book - prompts that are ideal for practice late-stage interview exercises.

In 2022, I interviewed for a generalist UX Designer role with a major airline. I made it past the technical and behavioral interviews and was then assigned a take-home exercise that I had 24 hours to complete. At the time, I didn’t know about the controversy surrounding these types of exercises in the design world; this particular exercise was an actual product that they use (this changes things a bit).

I felt frustrated by the assignment because of the lack of ability to ask questions/define constraints and that there was already strong bias when evaluating interviewee responses. This was one of my few experiences with a take-home exercise and one that I wanted to be better prepared for if it happened again. In order to better prepare, I decided to give this book a read.

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The Canvas

Interviewers always ask some variation of the question: “Tell me about your design process.” It’s a question I’ve never answered the same way twice and often one I have difficulty answering without elaborating on a specific project. When approaching a product design exercise, my response has often been the same: drawing a stress-induced blank!

Dashinsky shares his model canvas for these exercises and it’s one that I will be using next chance I get:

1. Why: understand the goal

2. Who: define audience

3. When / Where: context and needs

4. What: list ideas

5. Prioritize & Choose: impact / effort matrix

6. Solve

7. How: measure results

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Thoughts on the book

Dashinsky did a stellar job at communicating the value of designers and made a strong case, in a relatively small number of pages, for conducting better design interviews. My first key takeaway is that on-site exercises tend to focus more on evaluating a designer’s product thinking while an at-home exercise evaluates more basic visual and deliverable skills. In retrospective, this makes a lot of sense. This isn’t ‘gospel’ but it tends to be the case.

My second key takeaway is this: if given the chance to do an on-site, design critique, or similar exercise, think out loud as much as possible. During an interview with another company, I was given the opportunity to do a portfolio review (earlier stage task) and really enjoyed being given the chance to talk someone through my design decisions. The goal moving forward is to treat all exercises like this.

Lastly, Dashinsky switches audiences and appeals to managerial-level folks who may be looking to gain advice in regard to conducting their own design interviews. He provides a list of questions to evaluate designer behavior design the interview/activity (“Do they ask questions?” is an example); I found this to be just as helpful as the actual canvas he provides earlier in the book to solve the exercise itself.

Overall, I enjoyed the read and will be practicing using the canvas with some of the prompts he lists at the end of the book!