Scenario

You are working in the Amazon buyer squad for iOS. You have recently launched an updated design language for the app that is getting positive feedback, but a lot of the feedback you are receiving also revolves around the fact that buying feels overwhelming.

Data

Here are some customer quotes from your latest round of research:

• “I like the new design but it feels like there is so much distraction”.

• “The deals I’m seeing are completely irrelevant”

• “Why do I see movies, light bulbs, and kids toys in the same screen?”

The feedback you are getting is reflected on your product data:

• The search bar has a conversion rate of 22.6%

• The home tab has a conversion rate of 6.2%

Your team’s hypothesis is that this happens because people use the search bar when they have made a decision on what they want, vs. the home tab when they are simply browsing. However, you all believe there is massive room for improvement.

Goal

Find a way to increase to increase the conversion rate from the home tab in the Amazon iOS App by addressing your customer pain points and potentially introducing a more personalized home screen experience.

Some suggested ideas by your stakeholders include:

• Introducing a personalization quiz.

• Restructuring the sections in the homepage to be more relevant.

• Allowing users to customize their home tab.

• Improving your personalization algorithm.

Deliverable

• Define the key metrics for an initiative like that. What data, other than conversion rate, is important to you to better understand the problem and test your solution?

• Come up with a few ideas using sketching techniques such as Crazy 8’s or Concept Sketching.

• Pick your favorite idea, mock it up in Figma, and create a simple, medium-fidelity prototype. You can find various UI examples of Amazon in the Figma community.

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. If you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community, you can share your process and output in the Designary chat.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation.

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition.

• Figma for mockups and prototypes.

This challenge will help you with

• Product sense

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes.

Scenario

You are working in one of Slack's AI Product Squads. Your squad consists of a product manager, three AI-focused engineers, a data analyst, and a user researcher.

Your team has recently launched the first pilot of Slack AI and has seen some positive results with pilot customers. Slack AI can:

• Summarise unread messages

• Summarise conversations

• Answer search queries

From your conversations with existing pilot customers, you notice that customers talk positively about the different AI features but do not remember to use them frequently enough to continue paying for it.

Data

Along with your user researcher and data analyst, you have run a few initial surveys and interview cycles, showing the following:

• Customers report a 32% Sean Ellis Test score (“How would you feel if you could no longer use Slack AI?”), which indicates there isn’t product-market fit for the feature just yet. Your team goal is to get that score to 40% and up.

• Customers use Slack AI features 1-2 per week, whereas your company goal is to get people to use AI features 3-4 times a day.

• Customers report that the AI features are slightly hard to find, so they forget to use them.

Goal

Come up with a new, radical way for Slack users to find and engage with its AI features, that is significantly easier to find than the current version. Assume that the technical possibilities are endless, and your world-class team can work around any concept you can imagine.

Deliverable

• Define the goal and key metrics for an initiative like that. What data will show you if you are successful?

• Come up with a few ideas using sketching techniques such as Crazy 8’s or Concept Sketching.

• Pick your favorite idea, mock it up in Figma, and create a simple, medium-fidelity prototype. You can use one of the Slack UI Kits that are available in the Figma Community to take some inspiration on the overall direction.

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. If you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community, you can share your process and output in the Designary chat.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation.

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition.

• Figma for mockups and prototypes.

This challenge will help you with

• Product thinking

• AI-first Design

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes.

Scenario

You are working for Uber as part of the passenger special projects team. Your team comprises a product manager, two full-stack engineers, a content designer, and a user researcher.

Intro

The Uber commercial team is considering testing a new initiative for passengers: allowing them to pre-order drinks and snacks for their rides.

• Rides less than 15’ long allow users to preorder drinks (water, iced coffee and tea, soft drinks).

• Rides longer than 15’ also allow users to preorder specific types of packaged snacks (crisps, puffs)

Uber drivers will stock some of these items in the car trunk in special fridges & containers. Only selected, high-rated Uber drivers will participate in this program, so the service won’t always be available to the passenger.

Your product squad has been tasked with developing a prototype for this new experience, testing it with users, and evaluating its viability.

Goal

Come up with a high-fidelity flow and prototype to allow users to pre-order drinks and snacks when hailing an Uber.

• Think of the end-to-end user flow;

  • How would you announce this feature to users?

  • When should the user see this option?

  • How do they order and pay?

• Make sure to include happy and unhappy paths;

  • What happens if an item is out of stock?

  • What happens if drinks aren’t cold yet?

  • What happens if a driver doesn’t offer this service?

• Include a way for the user to rate their ordering experience.

Deliverable

• (Optional) Interview 1-2 people who use Uber regularly for longer rides and test their intent to have drinks or snacks onboard.

• (Optional) Use sketching or low-fidelity wireframing to generate a few ideas of how this flow would work.

• Define what metrics or qualitative data you plan to gather and evaluate to test the viability, usability, and satisfaction of this new experience. What commercial and product metrics are important? What research methods are you planning on using to get deeper insight?

• Mock up the experience in Figma and create a rough prototype. If you are practicing your UI skills, recreate the app from scratch. Otherwise, try a file from the Figma community and use the public Uber Base Gallery.

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. You can share your process and output in the comment section (by adding a note) if you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community or simply share it internally with your team and peers.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition

• Figma for mockups and prototypes

This challenge will help you with

• Product thinking

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes. There is no affiliation with the companies portrayed.

👋 Welcome to the Product Design Challenge: Every month, you’ll receive a realistic product design challenge to work on your skills, including product thinking, UX design, research, and prototyping. You can use it purely for practice purposes or even as a portfolio case study. If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge, you can manage your preferences in your account settings.

Scenario

You are working for Threads (Meta) as part of the consumer app team. Your team comprises a product manager, two full-stack engineers, a back-end engineer, and a user researcher.

Intro

The Threads commercial team has noticed that many users churn after Weeks 1 and 4, as the content they discover in the app is “less relevant than on X”.

Through a recent testing cycle, your user researcher has come back with the following key issues, as reported by your users:

• A lot of the content on the home feed is irrelevant.

• There is no way for users to see the most recent posts in their home tab.

• There is no way for users to filter content by people they follow.

• The hashtag functionality is hard to understand/use.

Goal

Come up with a few ideas on updating the app home screen in order to:

• Increase average time spent on the Theads app.

• Increase app retention after Week 1 and Week 4.

You can suggest new features, update the layout, or suggest a change in the algorithm (if you are up for it). All are potentially viable ideas that will be evaluated by your product manager, tech lead, and commercial team.

Deliverable

• Optionally, interview 1-2 people about using the Threads app, to further capture insight on the stated problems.

• Come up with 1-3 ideas on how to solve the most notable issues from above.

• Optionally, sketch out some of these ideas on paper.

• Mock up at least one of these ideas in Figma. If you are practicing your UI skills, recreate the app from scratch. Otherwise, try following a file from the Figma community.

• Optionally, create a working prototype and test it with the users you interviewed.

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. You can share your process and output in the comment section (by adding a note) if you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community or simply share it internally with your team and peers.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition

• Figma for mockups and prototypes

This challenge will help you with

• Product thinking

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes. There is no affiliation with the companies portrayed.

👋 Welcome to the Product Design Challenge: Every month, you’ll receive a realistic product design challenge to work on your skills, including product thinking, UX design, research, and prototyping. You can use it purely for practice purposes or even as a portfolio case study. If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge you can manage your preferences in your account settings.

Scenario

You are working as a product designer for Spotify in the podcast team. Your team comprises a product manager, a front-end engineer, a back-end engineer, and a user researcher.

Intro

Improving retention for paid subscriptions is one of the company’s most important objectives for this year.

Data & Key Considerations:

• The team has decided to invest more in podcasts to increase engagement and retention.

• Users who listen to podcasts on Spotify retain 24% more at 6 months than users who don’t.

• Currently, users on a paid plan don’t get any added benefit when listening to podcasts.

• Engineers in your team have been playing around with the OpenAI API and are open to trying options that use Generative AI for new ideas and features.

Goal

• Identify some key opportunities/features to improve the podcast experience on Spotify to increase usage and retention for paid subscriptions.

• (Optional) Interview 1-2 people in your local network who listen to podcasts on Spotify or other apps to identify their biggest challenges.

• (Optional) Sketch some of these ideas on a piece of paper.

• Pick one of these ideas and design a high-fidelity prototype on Figma.

Hints

• Take inspiration from other podcast apps; what key features provide high engagement? Try putting together your inspiration and references in your Figma or Figjam file.

• You can choose to do this exercise on the mobile or desktop app.

• You can explore options that use Generative AI or not; it’s entirely up to you.

• You can use openly available Figma libraries such as this one for desktop or this one for mobile.

• Alternatively, if you would like to practice your UI design skills, try recreating the Spotify UI from scratch.

💡 Retention is a challenging metric to track, as you can only see the results of a product update after time. How can you use more short-term product metrics to evaluate how successful you are?

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. You can share your process and output in the comment section (by adding a note) if you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community or simply share it internally with your team and peers.

Recommended tools

• Pen & Paper for sketching and ideation

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition

• Figma for mockups and prototypes

This challenge will help you with

• Product thinking

• Business thinking

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

Disclaimer

This challenge's scenario, data, and content are purely conceptual and for educational purposes. There is no affiliation with the companies portrayed.

If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge but would still like to receive the Designary newsletter, you can manage your subscription preferences in your account settings.

Scenario

You are working as a product designer for Airbnb in one of the consumer mobile app squads. Your team consists of a product manager, two full-stack engineers, a QA engineer, and a user researcher.

Problem

As part of a recent research initiative, our team ran a customer survey to ask people how to improve their experience with renting on Airbnb. The survey was sent via email to 1000 users who recently made their first booking.

64% of users selected “Additional services when renting (laundry, ironing)” as their most important benefit for improving their rental experience.

We are looking at evaluating whether such an option would provide value to users and the business and how it would work within the consumer app.

As part of this exercise, you can make the following assumptions:

• We can partner with laundry services in selected areas to launch this add-on.

• These services can collect and delivery laundry from your customers during their stay.

• The cost depends on the items being sent for washing and whether ironing is needed.

Goal

• Define the key success metrics for a feature like this: Why should the company invest in building it, and how will it affect commercial metrics? What product metrics show us if we are successful?

• Come up with a way to test the demand for such an option without having to build a feature. How would you test it inside the app?

• Design a prototype to test with users, leveraging openly available libraries such as this. If you would like to practice your UI design skills, try recreating the Airbnb App UI from scratch. Think through the whole user flow:

  • How does a user first see the option for add-on services?

  • How do they select and pay for it?

  • How do they schedule collecting their laundry?

Sharing your work

This is an internal exercise, but sharing your work is recommended. You can share your process and output in the comment section (by adding a note) if you’d like to openly get feedback from the Designary community or simply share it internally with your team and peers.

Recommended tools

• Figjam or Miro for noting down your thinking & problem definition

• Figma for mockups and prototypes

This challenge will help you with

• Product Thinking

• Business Thinking

• UI Design

• UX Design

• Prototyping

If you don’t want to receive the monthly challenge but would still like to receive the Designary newsletter, you can manage your subscription preferences in your account settings.