How to deflect 'Design Challenges'

Background

Personally, I've been working in design & tech for over 20 years, and I have a Product Design Engineering degree from the UK.

To put this into context

My partner is a Carpenter who mainly builds rooves and has over 10 years experience. We often muse about the similarity in our work experiences, and how ludicrous it would be if any of his clients asked him to 'Just build a roof so that we can check that you can build rooves'

He has a business website with details of his past projects, and so do I - my portfolio which takes around 20-40 hours of effort to write up, design and animate EACH project - something I rarely find time to do on top of my usual working week.

Why Design Challenge requests make me so angry

If it's not already obvious, let me enlarge on this. At one point I had relocated from Australia to Europe, and suddenly encountered every UX job application requesting these 'Design challenges'. I was wasting hundreds of euros per month travelling to peoples offices, basically giving them free advice on their startups, and wasting full working weeks preparing them bespoke work which they would not pay for, may well have used to further their business, and didn't end up hiring me.

That's why any qualified, experienced, senior designers will always refuse design challenges, because inevitably they will feel really used. Added to that, even if you do submit a decent attempt at their moronic, non-sensical briefs, it goes completely over their head because they're suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect

For anyone still being insulted by 'Design Challenge' requests during hiring procedures, here's some text you're free to use... (replace with your own work links of course)

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How to respond and deflect

Before wasting hours of your time, make sure you know what the hiring process is in the first email or phone call, then you can respond accordingly:

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Hi ____,

I always refuse these 'Design Challenges or Tasks' because they are an unethical recruiting practice.

They are misconceived, because proper UX work can’t be done in a handful of hours. For example I would need a proper brief with highly detailed information about the business / KPI's, product and intended users. User research is then needed, which takes days to set up and weeks to complete, so it is impossible in this time frame.

It is simply not possible to do any decent or proper UX in a handful hours. This request shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what User Experience designers do. After the concepting and prototyping, I would need to run user testing for a similar timeframe, using participants representational to your target market.

I've been working in Product, UX and Tech for over 25 years. Most people handing out these design challenges don't even know that UX and UI are two different things, and are bowled over by pretty, but pointless UI that designers can download in free UI kits.

I have a large UX portfolio where my work can be judged at www.rachaelpage.com. I'd like to draw your attention to this 140 page UX research document which I produced for Sydney University, along with extensive wireframes - project/sydney-university

‍I'm not prepared to enter into this process before a Senior UX professional has properly reviewed my portfolio and I only work for free for charity. You have the option to hire me as a freelancer charged at my usual hourly rates.

I'm bewildered that people holding interviews for UX roles think they can ignore UX folios and judge a person on 3-40 hours of Visual Design (UI) work, which is not UX at all, and decent UX work can't even be started in that timeframe.

Added to that, Europe does have minimum wage laws, and you are not offering any protection against you using my work without payment. This is clearly an abuse. If you refuse to pay for my time, I will have to politely decline continuing this process.

Sincerely, ______________