Mock interview: Headspace App critique

Trying something new this time…

This week, our app critique team, five designers with multi-disciplinary backgrounds, tried something new to critique Headspace. We assigned each other specific roles to mock the app critique in real interviews. Two of us worked as presenters, and each presenter is assigned an evaluator. The other person played a host role to select an application and set questions for presenters.

Host (Carol)

The meditation market in the U.S is experiencing strong growth in recent years. Headspace, one of the most popular meditation applications, is famous for its warm interface and fun illustrations. How does Headspace do from UX designer perspectives? I, as the host, set questions from two aspects:

Firstly, I want presenters to explore how Headspace helps main users achieve their goals and how users’ goals match with its business goals; Moreover, as their mission says, Headspace is a personal meditation guide, right in your pocket. As a personal meditation guide, I want presenters to evaluate how Headspace personalizes users’ experience and potential opportunities to improve the current experience.

Reflections from Presenter 01 (Peggy)

This is our first design critique mock interview session. Before the host announced the app that I was supposed to critique in this session, I gathered thoughts on what types of apps might be asked to critique in a real interview. There were several types of apps that I thought of:

• Apps that are generally known to the public, have a large user base and target users of all demographics (Youtube, Spotify, etc.)
• Apps that are normally not for entertainment purposes but are considered “tools” in people’s daily life (Venmo, Google Map, etc.)
• Apps that are targeting a specific community (Dribbble, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Apps that are not as popular but are interesting to explore and analyze.

Being the first one to present in the session, just like any real interview, can be nerve-wracking, because of the uncertainty of “the unknown”. What are the possible questions the interviewer might ask me? What are the competitors of the company? What team is my interviewer on and what service and product are he/she working on?

These are the questions I would like to figure out before a real design critique challenges.

When the host announced that the target app for the critique session is “Headspace”, I instantly felt an adrenaline rush. “I have never used this app before.” is my first reaction in my mind. However, I quickly calmed myself down and started to familiarize the app. The whole process is relatively smooth and I did a good job interacting with the host and making sure that me and the host are on the same page. However, there are certain things that I can improve and better my answers. For example, one of the biggest “mistakes” I made during the process is that I might focus a lot on my personal point of view and fail to link the logic behind the designs to the target users of the app, even though I might put myself in a user’s position sometimes. Another key lesson learned is that wording MATTERS. Especially in an interview session, it is important to talk professionally and avoid too many catchphrases. The solution to this is just practice, practice, and practice! Practicing how to discuss a topic professionally would also make it easier for you to communicate with team members at work, and eventually improve team productivity.

Comments from evaluator 01 (Yutong)

Peggy did a great job by answering every question for her interviewer promptly. However, she didn’t realize to mention primary users and their main use case in the first place. It would be nice if Peggy can bring up her assumption of who might be the primary user as the app features should be built based on understanding towards them. I believe that understanding targeted users should be the foundation when doing an app critique.

When the interviewer asked Peggy to try out one of the free meditation courses and talked about her feelings, I assumed that the interviewer would want to access Peggy’s ability to analyze if the experience worked well or not. Instead of focusing on the overall design of the course experience, Peggy was drawn to the course content and spent a fair amount of time talking about it. I would avoid talking about the content too much given that I wasn’t a professional in the field of meditation. It could be risky to purpose my own feelings about the content. However, as a designer, Peggy can always talk about if the flow is streamlined, the UI placement is reasonable, or the app follows the design guideline.

Peggy did a great job of analyzing the pros and cons when the interviewer asked her if she should put a feature before or after the onboarding process. It is important to think about things from different perspectives!

Reflections from Presenter 02 (Bowen)

The questions for me mainly focus on the usage and further exploration of the app. After listening to the presentation and comments from the first presentation, I quickly started with the primary goals and primary users for the app and then discussed the main functionality of the app. By keeping the primary users and goals in mind, I was able to answer most of the questions on the point. Some of the questions for me include: How do you feel about the app? How will you redesign the app given the drawbacks you mentioned previously? My approach was that I tended to list out what I saw from the app then try to summarize the key points. I tried to list out all the details as much as possible, which made interviewers and evaluators lose track. From this experience, I learned that it’s super important to answer the questions with structure and keep the answer concise and to the point.

Comments from evaluator 02 (Shaonan)

Bowen did a great job of leading the interviewer to follow every screen she has been critiqued on. She is truly focusing on getting everyone on the same page. However, for the first time of one specific app user, when she came across contents that she was not sure about, she expressed her confusion right away, and followed by a clarification in seconds shortly. The problem in doing that is, it would easily carry the interviewee away from the questions she was being asked, as she was trying to acknowledge every part of the content. One potential solution would be to build a sense of frame for each of the questions. For instance, if the question was related to the business goal (Refer to the question we had: which part of the content on this page would intrigue the users to subscribe premium?), it would be better to follow a top-down approach to answer.

Talking of the visual design, for instance, being asked about how you think about this app from visual perspective and in any way what would you do to improve it? It is highly suggested that we use professional phrases describing the features on the screen. For instance, if the app adopts the card-based user interface, we could emphasize on how the cards develop a good (or bad) visual hierarchy.

Back to the first question, Bowen came across, which is actually the hardest one, “What do you think about this app from an overall perspective?”

It is hard because it sets you free from critique rather than giving you specific guidance. In that case, we can always start from analyzing the primary users and the primary problems this app devotes to solve. Instead of walking through everything, it is suggested to focus on one main page as you provide a solid reason why you want to critique on this page specifically. It could be the landing page or the searching page or any page you are most interested about.

In conclusion, if you are a critic who appreciates the bottom-up approach, be sure to summarize the questions you are asked at the end, like questions about the user interface or task flow.

Last but not least…

It is the first time for us to try this new critique method. We all think we learned a lot from it. Hope our reflections and comments are able to give you some inspirations on preparing app critique interviews;)

Feel free to give us any comments & suggestions!

Next One

We will have our next app critique — Airbnb — later this week! How does Airbnb make a living during Cov-19 period? Let’s explore together!