Design exercises are often used in evaluating UX Designers.  Here’s a good article by Braden Kowitz of Google Ventures on how to break it down.

Now that we’re past hunting for unicorns, and we know what design roles are needed at a startup, it’s time to get into the gritty details: the design interview.

I wasn’t really good at interviewing designers until I had a few dozen interviews to compare. So if this is your first time interviewing a designer, I highly recommend finding a design advisor to help interview (and source) candidates for your startup. I’ll often do this for startups as part of my role at Google Ventures, and we’ve found it useful in nearly every case. For teams without designers, a design advisor is just about the only way to get an accurate read on a candidate’s design skills. And for teams with designers, it’s nice to have a second opinion from someone who’s done a bunch of interviews recently.

Even with help, you’ll still need to give design interviews yourself, and that’s what this article is about. There are three common parts to a design interview: a portfolio review (discussing a candidate’s previous design projects), a product critique (tearing apart a product you both understand), and the design exercise — my favorite!

Continue reading.