UX Whiteboard Challenges

For the past few weeks, I have attended 10+ whiteboarding sessions & interviews, where I received amazing feedback from senior UX designers, Product designers. One of the companies I interviewed with invited me for a Whiteboarding session, it was my first time doing a whiteboarding session. This article is written to help other junior UX designers who are facing similar challenges.

With it being my first time, I spent many hours researching and learning from other designers online. In the end, I created a cheat sheet that I studied and referred to. The outcome? I am still waiting! (*Fingers crossed*)

What is a Whiteboard Challenge?

A whiteboard challenge is a challenge where you will be given a problem to solve in the Product Design space. For example, “how do you create a seamless experience of?xyz?”?or “how do you increase conversion for a website?”. In this interview, it is as if your interviewers are the clients for a project (a lot of role-playing). It is typically around an hour long and done in front of a whiteboard. With the current pandemic, software like Figma, Adobe XD are used.

What is a Whiteboard Challenge for?

To do well in a whiteboarding challenge, it is good to know the intention behind them and why they are asking you to do it. It is not on how you can make pretty wireframes on the spot or how fast you come up with solutions right after the problem is presented. Instead, it is about seeing how you think through the problem and how you arrive at the solution based on your findings. These are a few common reasons why they have a whiteboard challenge:

• To show your interviewer know how you think or solve a design problem through your questions and solutions.
• To show your interviewer how you work well with them and in a team.
• To see if you are the right fit in their team makeup.

My Approach to Whiteboard Challenges

Knowing that my interviewer could prepare any problem or case for me to solve, I couldn’t prepare anything specific in advance but I could prepare a set of questions I’ll ask to help me get to the bottom of the challenge. In the end, I compiled a list of questions to ask the interviewer about the problem and work from there. These questions helped me stay on track and ask things that would break an overwhelming problem down.

Since the interviewers could throw any problem for you to solve on the spot, these are a set of questions to help you scope out the challenge. There is no need to ask every single question listed (time limit!) but you can pick and chose which one is relevant to your challenge and which will help you flesh out the solution.

If memorizing a set of questions can break the natural flow of solving the challenge for you, you can use the 5W’s and 1H’s method: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How. Typically that could cover everything that you’d need to know to move forward.

To demonstrate the above steps here is the step-by-step framework: Questions to ask at each step for the prompt:

Design a dashboard for the executives of a company that helps them visualize their company's profit margin. It should include details about their product lines. This dashboard should help the executive make informed decisions on where to increase or decrease resource investments.

Time frame: 50-minute challenge; 10 minutes Q&A at the end.

Step 1: Understanding the Problem & Context (10 minutes)

• What are the pain points with current experience?
• What kind of device should the designs be for?
• What are the timeline and constraints?
• Are there any more details and context of the challenge?
• How will we measure success?
• What is the goal of this challenge? (Allow the interviewers to let you know what they expect from the session. Do they want wireframes or ideas? )

This is what our whiteboard should look like in the current state.

Step 1.5: A rough summary + mention what you are moving on to?

• Does it look like we have covered everything? Do you have more to add?
• Now that I have a rough understanding of the problem, I want to know more about the users. Would you like to add anything else or shall I move on?
• If you think the problem is too big or generic to solve in the session: “I can see that the problem is x,y, and z. Being cautious of the time, can I focus on solving x because of (insert reason: could be a tight timeframe, urgent problem to solve or resources you found out through the questions)?” If they say no, try your best to do it, they might want to see how you handle that situation.

Step 2: Understanding the Users (5 minutes)

• What are the different types of users? Which one do you consider as the primary user?
• Have you done any user testing?
• What are some assumptions about their behaviors and problems?
• What are the benefits we should provide?
• How does this persona measure success? What motivates them?
• What are the challenges they faced? What are their pain points?

This is what our whiteboard should look like in the current state.

Step 2.5: Make a decision on which personas or assumptions you are moving forward with

• If there are a lot of personas to choose from: From all the user groups you mentioned, I would go ahead with <subset of users> because <reason>.
• If there are not many details about the users: Since we don’t know much about <users>, making some assumptions about them, they are <characteristics and behaviors>.
• Our persona for the current prompt:
• Name: Alice; Age:
• Age: 50 (assumption--> not tech savy)
• Occupation: Product line manager
• Goal: A simple dashboard to view trends of products and see if they have sold above the minimum quota.

Step 3: Main user flow (5 minutes)

• Tell a story of the user you decided to focus on in Step 2, what is their main user flow for this experience?
• Write it out and assign numbers to them (1,2,3…). This way when you sketch out your solutions in the next step, you can easily refer to their user journey and which action they are doing.

1) Alice logins.

2) Alice views a homepage

3) Alice can view the total profit made by the company (ABC).

4) Alice can view the product that has made the highest profit.

5) Alice can view cost breakdown with the help of a pie chart, bar graph to compare the profits of each product line.

6) Alice views all the product lines number of items sold and also is able to decide which item has crossed the minimum quota and which products have not.

7) Alice views a line chart comparing the profit with each quarter of all the products as a whole.

8) Alice views a pie chart comparing the profits of all the products.

Step 4: Sketch Out Some Solutions (25 minutes)

• You will not have time to sketch out everything, choose the critical screens and check in with your interviewers with “Since we have a time limit, I’ll have to sketch out <screen from flow 3>, <screen from flow 5>, screen from flow 7>. Is that alright?”
• Sketch out some wireframes or solution based on your main user flow from Step 3.
• Draw it out clearly and label your drawings.

Step 5: Summarise (5 minutes)

• After reaching this far, a rough summary would be great to recap what you’ve done to refresh their memory and finish strong.
• Main problem → A persona you decided to design for → Main user flow as a story → walk through the solution.

Bonus (If you have time!)

• Suggest alternative use cases to show that you consider other factors. For example, accessibility considerations, other ideas or situational use cases (What if the user is in <a different enviroment> instead?)

Things to Remember Doing Throughout

• Always base your decision on what was previously stated/decided and link back constantly.
• Always ask questions to the interviewer to scope the problem.
• Write down their answers to your questions on the whiteboard or digitally in a neat manner.
• Think out loud. It will be useful for the interviewers to know what you are thinking and don’t complete it in silence.
• Time checks are important! Make sure you have time to present your solutions and summarise them in the end.
• If you are going to make assumptions say that it is an assumption.
• Have structure and focus.