That wasn't really my point. My point is that when you are working on a team, it's a collaborative experience and if your superior asks you to do a task a certa

That wasn't really my point. My point is that when you are working on a team, it's a collaborative experience and if your superior asks you to do a task a certain way, there may be a good reason why. The exercise here may have been to see what ideas you could generate about the user experience and less about aesthetic polish of a final product. I got the sense from the post that the author spent a lot of detail in making it look aesthetically pleasing, which is only one part of user experience design. A larger part of it is design something easy to use and understand. Sure, feel free to spend extra time on the take-home assignment to signal to the potential employer you are passionate, but that's a different thing.