What designers can learn from consulting case interviews
Couple of months back, I was speaking at a local meet-up in Bangalore about efficient user research techniques. During the Q&A session, someone asked, — “Most often our designers are able to get research done right. But when it comes to providing solutions based on that research we struggle. Are there any ways to improve that?” …The question took me back to my college days — The consulting case interviews!
During college placements, I prepped for case interviews to get into the esteemed jobs of ‘strategy consulting’. Although, I ended up designing software products 😅 the preparation stayed with me.
Designing is essentially problem solving, isn’t it?
So, what are these case interviews?
Case interviews are type of interviews where interviewees are presented with a business scenario and a problem statement which they have to solve. Along the way, they have to ask right questions to dissect the presented scenario, make few assumptions and crunch few numbers.
You can find examples of case interviews here, here or here.
In many ways, case interview scenarios resemble with design problems that we come across at our workplace. There’s a problem, some existing data and some observations from the field. Hence, we can surely learn a thing or few from these interviews to get better at designing.
So, what all we can steal as an artist? 😉
1. Structuring The Problem
A wise man once said -
“Always break down your problem in at least 3 sub-problems.”
Success of a case interview lies in your ability to breakdown any problem into “Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive” sub-problems. You go on breaking down these subproblems further until you reach problem that you can handle independently.
Consider an example:
Practicing case interviews will get you better at such problem structuring. We as designers often miss out on obscure parts of problem. And eventually, those parts come back to haunt us.
“We mentioned the rating on details page but missed it completely on listing page!”
“We should’ve changed marketing channel to fb instead of google to get better impact!”
Do you want your design solutions to be perfect? — First, get good at breaking down the problem.
Once you have prepared your ‘Issue Tree’, try to understand impact of each of those sub-problems. And then, solve each of these small problems in order of their impact.
Breaking down a problem also helps you while explaining the solution to the stakeholders. Business do not care if you are changing the ‘BUY NOW’ button’s colour to blue. All they want to know is how it will get more people to click on ‘BUY NOW’ button & thus, increase the revenue.
When you start describing solution along with its impact on the current problem, there’s no need for further convincing.
2. Making Logical Assumptions
A good designer should be a good ‘Hypothesiser’. Based on quantitative and qualitative data in hand, designers often need to make a few assumptions:
“Majority of our audience will understand Hindi written in English script than Devanagari”
“80% of our audience will use shortcut keys provided, while other 20% will use overflow menu to perform actions”
Apart from your own field studies and research, these assumptions are also based on your observations of your surroundings. The art of ‘making logical assumptions’ can only be learned via practice. And case interviews are there to help.
“Let’s assume that 65% of India’s population ages between 25 to 40”
“Let’s assume 1 out 1000 passenger misses the flight”
I don’t know the exact numbers in a country’s census data. Neither do I work for any aviation company. But from the news I hear, conversations I have, I can come up with these numbers which are fairly accurate. And doing this again and again will only make me better.
Apart from hypothesising the solution, this practice will also help you understand qualitative research in better manner. As a designer, you should learn to correlate qualitative user research with quantitative data.
Users lie. so does insufficient data.
Before getting into prototyping, you have to assume a user behaviour that acknowledges both qualitative and quantitative data. And solving case interviews will add more confidence in such assumptions.
3. Dealing With Numbers
‘Are designers fond of numbers?’ Unfortunately, NO. I have seen very few designers who talk about retention percentage, CAC or any other impact related numbers during interviews.
‘Guesstimate’ — a type of case interview question, which wants you to answer only in numbers. Solve those and you’ll see a change in your approach towards designing. You don’t need to learn calculus, but a basic understanding of arithmetic and geometry can take you long way in design.
Arithmetic helps you understand your product funnels better.
“How many % of users drop off after clicking BUY NOW? If the number is worse than drop during payment process, shouldn’t we focus on login/registration form that comes after BUY NOW?”
While geometry will help you get the UI right.
“This card component will crumple down below 1000px, so let’s use 3 column layout instead of 4”
Apart from this, case interviews taught me to be aware of product metrics.
Your designs are only as good/bad as the numbers they move.
Learn about targets that your design needs to achieve. Ask product managers for current numbers. ‘Few users click on BUY NOW button’ is less scary than ‘Only 3% people click on BUY NOW button.’
4. Peaking Into World Of Business
Exposure to market terminology & business world is yet another important benefit of case interviews. Design lies at the intersection of technology, business and customer understanding. Hence, ‘Business Knowledge’ is lethal weapon in any designer’s arsenal.
Case interviews won’t teach you a lot about business, but certainly enough to get you interested. You can go ahead and ask — do my designs help to grow the business or not? This will help you prioritise your design tasks.
As you dive a little deep into case interview preparation, you realise there are certain types of problems that keep repeating themselves. And experts have created some frameworks to solve these problems faster. E.g. Profitability framework — which essentially asks you to do a cost-benefit analysis of the issue at hand.
You can build analogous frameworks for your design tasks too. Practice will make such frameworks imbibe in your subconscious, eventually making you design faster.
Concluding…
Design is an evolving discipline — especially, software product design. Traditional design studies will only take you to a certain extent. To be a good designer in this modern era, we need to keep peaking into technology, business and people’s social lives. Learn from these as much as you can.
I would have never imagined that preparing for consulting interviews will help me design better. But it did. (And believe me, by very good margin!) I hope it helps you too!
If not, then again it’s a very good food for thought. Give it a try! 🙂
