I remember thinking it was a weird assignment as user experience design doesn’t really exist without, you know, users. I also found myself wondering if they were really expecting me to design an app in just three days. But with no time to think I threw myself over it. Feverishly, I was trying to emphasise with non-existing users and unfamiliar situations while at the same time researching travel insurance, planning the app architecture, thinking up features and brainstorming about visuals. I was enlisting the help of anyone within earshot and would’ve worked myself to a pulp if that hadn’t included my sister. Her idea of helping was a bit different as she chose to instead begin questioning the whole thing to the best of her abilities:

“Why do you have to do a test?” “Haven’t they seen your work?” “Haven’t they read your article?” “Do they even pay you to do it?”

My sister is an industrial technician at a large manufacturing company and sometimes I envy the straightforwardness of it. To her, a design test makes as little sense as an extra asshole on her elbow. She proceeded to grill me “big-sister-style” about the assignment and when I admitted to already having worked on it non-stop for a day and a half, she said:

“If you work non-stop they won’t get a realistic idea of how far you can get in three regular working days. Stop working; what you have now is more than enough.”

Reluctantly, I complied because while I of course really wanted the job, I couldn’t argue with my sister’s logic. If the assignment was a way to test my process and skills as well as work speed and efficiency, spending more than the equivalent of three working days would be cheating — myself most of all. It would set the bar far higher than I would be able to live up to as a regular, full-time employee. But most importantly, my sister had succeeded in voicing the one issue which was nagging in the back of my mind.

While my business might not exactly be booming the one client I had was in fact paying me to work for them. I was even turning down other potential projects because they were completely unpaid. Hell, I’d even written an article about it just one month prior to the design assignment.

Could I even justify that the digital agency — who probably had way more capital than all of my clients combined — did not have to pay for my work? Simply because it was a “test assignment” they had “made up” as part of their hiring process? I was having a serious case of double-standards.

The hiring process ended up involving two or three meetings plus the design assignment itself and attending two events, one which lasted from morning to noon. It lasted an entire month and may have gone on for even longer if not for pressuring them for an answer. When finally their conclusion came in and it was a rejection, I wanted nothing more than to send them a bill.

Instead I had to painfully realise I had done exactly what I was arguing against in my own article: I’d taken on an unpaid design assignment after all. I’d endorsed the very thing which made me struggle as a freelancer in the first place. And though I eventually found full-time employment in another company this first run-in with the design test wasn’t going to be my last.