To practice my product thinking skills and basic UX techniques, I have set out to complete small exercises used in product interviews.
My main goal was to step away from my visual design tendencies and hone in on my product thinking skills. Additionally, I wanted to practice creating wireframes, lowFi prototypes and user flows. This challenge was inspired by this Medium article which emphasized the importance of product thinking in entry level designers, and the exercises were taken from the list the author provided.
A few trends of note: 54% of the world’s population live in urban communities, the average marriage age for men is 29 (up from 26 two decades ago) and for women is 27 (up from 23 in the same time period). Given these trends, city dwellers tend to spend most of their twenties living with roommates. Finding and keeping a good roommate, however, gets harder as more people swarm into cities.
Design a mobile product experience that appeals to millennials that makes it safe to find the ideal roommate in New York City. Design the experience from the perspective of a person who is looking for a roommate as well as the one who is looking for the apartment. Once the ideal roommate is found, what else can this product do to make the roommate experience better?
We are looking for you to identify pain points in the “finding/keeping a good roommate” journey and to find ways to solve for those pain points.
Constraint: Stick to existing mobile capabilities of iOS and Android.
Microsoft OneNote (Digital Pen and Paper)
3 Hours (Note: The suggested time for these exercises was one hour. For this, I wanted to take my time and do more research during the process as I am using it as a learning exercise.)
Spotify has decided to give artists control of their catalogues on their platform. For the first time, artists can manage their own albums, upload their own artwork, sell specific merchandise, add lyrics to their music etc. and it’s all on their own terms.
Design a Mac-based editor and artist management system that allows artists to manage their presence on Spotify. The solution should account for all existing artist content on Spotify but feel free to get creative and add additional features that an artist might find useful.
Constraint: You are designing a Mac desktop app, you will be relegated to the OS’s abilities but you can disregard any web-related technical constraints because they don’t apply here.
Microsoft OneNote (Digital Pen and Paper)
2 Hours (Note: The suggested time for these exercises was one hour. For this, I wanted to take my time and do more research during the process as I am using it as a learning exercise.)
