🚩 Homework, Spec work, whiteboard tasks, etc. - This has been spoken about endlessly so I won’t go on too much about it, but suffice it to say if the only way a hiring process can establish the qualifications of a designer is to get them to sit down and do some design work, then the process is broken and is likely leading to terrible hiring decisions fuelled by a self-selecting candidate pool of the segment of the designer population who
Having hired a lot of quality designers and researchers over the years, I have to lodge some disagreements with your points 1 & 2.
1. A short whiteboard problem solving assignment, done during the interview process, is completely reasonable and can be extremely helpful to understand how a person thinks on the fly. I do strongly concur that out-of-band homework assignments (ie, unpaid work) are totally inappropriate.
2. Having designers and researchers meet with an experienced PM and Engineering lead is also strongly desirable IMO. We're not looking for evaluation of the design and research skill sets by these folks, but rather soft skills, eg communication, collaboration, initiative, integrating UX into the development process, organizational culture fit, etc.
Your other points...all spot on in my view.
My qualifications: 15y as a UXD individual contributor (up to UX Architect), 18y building and leading UX teams (up to VP UX).
Having hired a lot of quality designers and researchers over the years, I have to lodge some disagreements with your points 1 & 2.
1. A short whiteboard problem solving assignment, done during the interview process, is completely reasonable and can be extremely helpful to understand how a person thinks on the fly. I do strongly concur that out-of-band homework assignments (ie, unpaid work) are totally inappropriate.
2. Having designers and researchers meet with an experienced PM and Engineering lead is also strongly desirable IMO. We're not looking for evaluation of the design and research skill sets by these folks, but rather soft skills, eg communication, collaboration, initiative, integrating UX into the development process, organizational culture fit, etc.
Your other points...all spot on in my view.
My qualifications: 15y as a UXD individual contributor (up to UX Architect), 18y building and leading UX teams (up to VP UX).
Great read 🙏