Design take-home tests are no good

Redesign a microwave for me, please

Photo by Mike Marquez on Unsplash

Redesign a microwave for me, please.

This is not an unusual thing to ask of a candidate, but it’s definitely not something I had personally been asked to do before, which was a very refreshing change from the usual design tasks I received from potential employers in the past.

In October of 2017 I received a message from Meaghan at Beamery, who mentioned their London team were looking to get one more designer on board. At first, I wasn’t quite sure about leaving the job I was working in at the time, but after looking at both Meaghan and Grant’s online presence I thought it was definitely worth following up. The next day I met Grant at Ozone coffee near Old Street roundabout to grab a peppermint hot chocolate, and go for a walk & talk.

After chatting with Grant, I had a quick 30 minute call with Alex, the director of recruiting who later in an email mentioned “we’ve come to the decision that rather than going down the contrived take-home test route, we’d take a different direction and have you come in and do more of a collaborative working exercise with Grant & Meaghan” — Great! I’m not a fan of take-home tests at all.

Why don’t I like take-home tests? The simple answer is that being a designer in a team requires constant collaboration with others which you can’t do at home, alone, on a task you’ve been given a 5 minute brief on. Being part of a team consists of so much more than whether you are competent at the task. There is a whole spectrum of compatibility that needs to be assessed.

The collaborative task itself was pretty interesting, and all in all took around 15–20 minutes, made up of chatting, drawing out some simple pictures to illustrate a point, and some back-and-forth questions. I started to make a list of needs and pain points, but didn’t continue the list as the workshop felt a bit more like a casual chat than a formal documentation session, and I think this is where I was a little bit tripped up at first. I went into the session with the idea that I was expected to produce a meaningful result. After speaking with Grant recently about this session, which took place back in October, he confirmed a few things for me — mainly that what he was interested in seeing was how a candidate approached the problem, rather than how they executed the solution.

That approach has stuck in my mind as a rather successful one. In hindsight, it was a pretty accurate reflection of what working here feels like on a day-to-day basis. I don’t mean that we sit together in a group and go over the pro’s and con’s of having 10 buttons on a microwave when one knob will do the same job, but we do have genuine casual conversations pretty frequently about small nuances that come up on daily tasks, and this is exactly the kind of conversation we had in the collaborative microwave task.