2026: UX Design Challenge for Stratus

UX Design Challenge for Stratus - Read Final Report

Design Prompt

This exercise evaluates how you approach ambiguous product problems, reason through tradeoffs, and communicate strategic thinking—not visual polish or completeness. We expect clarity, judgment, and senior-level UX reasoning. We do not expect finished designs or comprehensive specs. 

Challenge Context

Stratus administrators manage users across complex organizational structures (50-500+ employees). These admins are office-based contractor employees—moderately tech-forward but not power users. User management is consistently rated as one of our most frustrating features. 

Your Task

Rather than designing a predetermined solution, show us how you would determine the right solution.

• Part 1: Understanding & Exploration (read the report)
  What would you want to learn? Describe how you would further understand this problem before designing.

• Part 2: Solution Directions & Impact (read the report)
  What solutions would you explore? Propose 2–3 potential solution directions.

• Part 3: Focused Execution (see below)
  Visualize one core idea. Choose your most promising solution direction and create a basic visual showing the core interaction.
  

Part 3: Basic Visual Showing Core Interaction

Annotations -

1. Display brief notifications when auto-save runs (see Solution 1); 

2. Display a time stamp for “last saved” (see Solution 1); 

3. Provide opportunity to easily Undo Changes (see Solution 1);

4. Allow multi-select, select all, and bulk actions (see Solution 2);