I felt taken advantage of. I found it to be an odd interview process for an intern role and overall had a bad experience.
I had a phone screen with a team member that would be managing me. After that, they sent me a case study to complete. It had both a research and design component. For the research component, they asked me to create a research plan that could be implemented to find out why one of the pages on their website had poor user engagement. It was odd that the case study targeted what appeared to be a real problem with their website (I think it's unethical when companies ask their candidates to do free work) rather than testing my skills with an unrelated design challenge.
After I submitted the case study, I was shocked when they asked me to continue doing more work on this case study. They told me that they wanted to launch my research plan on UserTesting.com. After the videos of the study came back, they wanted me to review the videos, compile my findings, and present recommendations/design solutions based on those findings. This felt like a huge red flag to me, since in this additional part of the case study, they were asking me to handle real qualitative data about their users.
I also didn't understand why they needed me to show them more work, so I brought up my concern that this part of the project wouldn't provide any additional information about my competencies. After I pushed back, they dropped this part of the project and scheduled my on-site interview.
They scheduled me to meet with EIGHT people at the on-site. I guess that was helpful for me, but I don't understand why they took time out of 8 people's schedules to interview an intern. So many things about this whole interview process felt so sketchy and inefficient to me.