10 UX design challenges to level up your skillset

Challenging yourself is a great way to grow as a UX designer — whether it’s by designing something completely unexpected or testing a new research method. UX design challenges can help you build new skills, explore unfamiliar territory, and push your creativity.

Intrigued? But not sure where to start? Don’t worry — we’ve got you covered with ten creative and practical design challenges to start with.

Design an improvement based on a guerrilla test

Timeframe — Approximately 5–10 hours

Goal — Choose any product and conduct guerrilla testing in an informal setting with at least five users. Then, redesign a part of the experience based on your findings.

Why — UX designers often struggle with securing budget for UX research or recruiting the right candidates. But sometimes the easiest solution is to just go where your users are and ask around. This challenge will help you break the barrier that many have.

Evaluate — Repeat the guerrilla testing, but this time with an improved version of the design, and compare reactions.

Skills — User testing, observation, empathy

Design a microinteraction for an uncommon action

Timeframe — Approximately 2–4 hours

Goal — Design and animate a microinteraction for some edge case action, such as deleting an item, giving a LinkedIn recommendation, or downloading a YouTube video.

Why — A good exercise to improve motion design skills. Focusing on uncommon actions means there are fewer established patterns to copy, and you need to figure out much more from scratch.

Evaluate — Test the feel on the real prototype (e.g., Lottie). Get feedback from users and motion designers.

Skills trained — motion design, interaction feedback, affordance

Design a zero UI pizza-ordering experience

Timeframe — Approximately 10–15 hours

Goal — Design a pizza-ordering experience that doesn’t use any visual UI elements, but rather is based on voice and gesture-based flows.

Why — With technology advancing and AI getting better at interpreting our commands and gestures, zero UI interfaces will grow in popularity. It also pushes you to think about UX in a broader sense than just interface design.

Evaluate — Wizard of Oz testing with a friend to simulate the experience.

Skills trained — Voice UX, constraint-based thinking, UX beyond interface design

Run a remote card sorting test for a content-heavy product

Timeframe — Approximately 6–10 hours

Goal — Pick a content-heavy product (e.g., news, ecommerce) and build its information architecture from scratch. Collect ~50+ possible categories/subpages and perform a card sorting exercise to understand the right hierarchy.

Why — Information architecture is one of the rarely practiced UX skills, although having strong fundamentals here helps with other aspects of user experience.

Evaluate — Compare to the original (assuming you picked a mature, research-driven product).

Skills trained — Information architecture, taxonomy, research synthesis

Redesign a poorly designed app

Timeframe — Approximately 15–25 hours

Goal — A classical design challenge. Choose a commonly criticized app (e.g., Craigslist) and redesign one core flow.

Why — Redesigning existing products is a good way to polish UI and usability skillset without focusing too much on the core experience or product value.

Evaluate — Perform user testing to compare the old vs the new version of the user flow.

Skills trained — Visual design, usability heuristics, flow clarity

Interface for a pet

Timeframe — Approximately 6–10 hours

Goal — Design an interface for a household animal, such as an intelligent feeder or a product helping dogs communicate they need to do business outside.

Why — Will push you to design for a type of user that doesn’t talk or can’t be interviewed. I’ll force you to focus on observation and other forms of research. You’ll also need to design strong feedback loops to teach an animal how to use the product.

Evaluate — Test it if possible.

Skills trained — Designing feedback mechanisms, speculative UX, observation research

Design a minimalist mobile app for a complex use case

Timeframe — Approximately 6–10 hours

Goal — Choose a complex use case, such as ordering food supplies for a restaurant or planning a home budget. Then design it to be as minimalist an experience as possible.

Why — Teaches minimalism and proper prioritization. Decomplexifying the world is a valuable skill

Evaluate — Test yourself if you can fulfill the basic needs with this app, while challenging the existence of every single design element.

Skills trained — Minimalism, prioritization, MVP design

Create a seamless web-to-app funnel

Timeframe — Approximately 10–20 hours

Goal — Design an end-to-end funnel where users start on the web and then are prompted to continue on the app (e.g., to use a specific app-only feature). Ensure smoothness of the experience as a whole.

Why — Web-to-app tactics that move traffic from web to app product help boost retention, engagement, and all other metrics. Designing web-to-app funnels is a competitive advantage.

Evaluate — Test the flow by simulating a transition from a mobile browser to the app (e.g., on a prototype) with a real user.

Skills trained — Cross-platform/omni-channel UX, funnel design

Create a design using only AI

Timeframe — Approximately 6–12 hours

Goal — Use only AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Midjourney, Uizard, Figma AI) to create a high-fidelity interface. You are only allowed to give and refine prompts, without designing yourself.

Why — AI can speed up the design enormously, but only if you know how to prompt it well. Designing only with prompts forces you to truly nail your prompt-engineering skills.

Evaluate — Gather feedback from other designers as if you designed it yourself.

Skills trained — Prompt engineering, rapid iteration, AI design

Design a dark pattern & reverse it

Timeframe — Approximately 4–8 hours

Goal — Create an intentionally manipulative flow (e.g., hard-to-cancel subscription), then redesign it ethically.

Why — Dark patterns can be a good inspiration on how to maximize business outcomes at a given step. Although I don’t encourage dark patterns, the more you know them, the easier it is to understand what the business cares about in a given flow.

Evaluate — Reflect. What are the things that you could take from the dark pattern to improve the effectiveness of the design while remaining ethical?

Skills trained — Ethical design, persuasive UX, dark pattern literacy

Conclusion

UX design challenges are an excellent way to regularly practice new skills. I strongly recommend completing at least one challenge of some sort each month (either in your work environment or outside of work hours).

Even better, do them with friends. Just like they are “book clubs”, we’ve been recently experimenting with “challenge clubs” — everyone works on the same design challenge, and at the end of the month, we share the results and give each other feedback. A great way to get to know each other while developing our own skill set.