100 UX Design Job Interview Questions— Making your mark

Unlike most other types of roles, UX focused job interview questions can be quite open-ended/theoretical and rightfully so. As mentioned in one of my previous articles, it’s hard to define what a good design really entails. So the interviewers can be pretty much stuck with testing your knowledge about design principles, elements, and foundational components. Also, make sure you have an extremely polished UX portfolio ready. You never know when the next great opportunity comes your way!

The UX design focused interview is really an attempt to understand your process/approach to the journey of building a great experience for key stakeholders, especially the users. There are many ways to describe a design process and here’s one that covers strategy through production.

Figure 1 — UX Design Process Overview

I’m going to attempt to summarize various job interview questions that are typically asked and try to provide some suggested responses. Please try to add your own personal experience/flavor and case studies to make it your own.

Also, one of the better approaches to responding to these questions is by using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action and Result). This allows you to break down a problem, identify the task at hand, describe the solution that you developed and highlight the outcome.

1. How do you define UX design or What is UX design?
   Suggestion: A successful UX design is about creating the best tool for a common set of tasks and making the user experience so seamless that people can do the tasks without really noticing they’re using the tool.
   Inspired by Roger Attrill
2. How do you work with key stakeholders and team members such as engineers, product managers or other designers?
   Suggestion: There are many UX design process frameworks, one of them which is included above, has 5 key phases, namely — discover, define, ideate, prototype and implement. Appropriate key stakeholders are identified for each of these phases such as Product Managers, Business Analysts, Sales, Marketing, Engineering and other teams. The key is to have strong communication lines across these various multi-disciplinary teams. I also prefer using collaboration tools such as Trello, UX Pin, Invision, Sketch, Principle. Also, show don’t tell philosophy always works — so creating quick interactive prototypes using these tools helps.The ability to empathize and understand the motivation of those you work with is crucial. Engineers, PMs, and other designers all come with their own particular needs and goals and if you can demonstrate your sensitivity to them, you’ll be well received.
   UPDATE: Added answers from my readers:
   Engineers: I’ve found that providing especially close attention to interaction design and accounting for edge cases is important. Engineers are responsible for building the product — making sure that your interactions function properly for all use cases will save your engineer friends time and frustration. Also, try to speak their language — learn how to code. Being confident in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is a great start.
   PMs: I emphasize communication, storytelling, and tradeoffs. PMs manage deadlines, appeal to admins and keep projects running smoothly. Make sure you and your PM are sync’d. Being able to tell a powerful story about your design will also help to make their job easier when trying to persuade other stakeholders.
   Designers: Show, don’t tell. Focus your attention toward the design problem instead of individual design preferences. Working with other designers is an incredible opportunity for collaboration and can push you to better work. When working with other designers, sometimes I like to practice pair design — it’s a great way to develop shared ownership over the work and push your individual design limits.
3. What are some of the current challenges that you face as a UX designer?
   Suggestion: For the most part, one of the key challenges in UX design projects stems from the fact that key stakeholders don’t always have a clear vision about the key goals, objects or the business requirements which results in a lot of ambiguity. So the “discover” and “define” phases are important in terms of getting on the same page as well as to further refine the objectives through conducting UX research, mapping out the experience journey, generating personas, developing red routes and visual storyboards.
4. Can you describe some of the tools that you use in your design workflow?
   Suggestion: I typically use the following tools throughout my design workflow:
   A. Discover — Trello, Google Docs, Lookback, Wufoo
   B. Define—Lucid Chart, MindMeister, Simple Card Sort
   C. Ideate — Balsamiq, Illustrator, Keynote
   D. Prototype — Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, InVision, After Effects
   E. Implement — Appium, HotJar, Google Anaytics
5. Who do you admire, follow and are inspired by in the industry?
   Suggestion: Julie Zhuo (Facebook), Daniel Burka (Google Ventures), Bo Ren(Facebook), Ximena Vengoechea (LinkedIn), and Frank Yoo (Lyft)
6. What’s the difference between information architecture and user experience?
   Suggestion: User experience (UX) is the art and science of integrating all the various elements that comprise an interactive system in such a way that meets users goals and expectations. Information architecture is a discipline where text, graphics, information structure and composition are organized in an intuitive manner such as a tree heirarchy to enhance meaning and improve user comprehension. UX is an umbrella term that requires multiple skill sets, information architecture being one of them.
7. Can you describe an end-to-end UX design process?
   Suggestion: See the process flow above.
8. Please describe how you would re-design a popular website which desperately needs a complete design overhaul e.g. Craigslist, Amazon, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.
   Suggestion: Typically, when this type of a question is asked, the expectation isn’t to give a precise answer but the real motive is to understand your thinking and ability to breakdown the question and perform a 360 assessment. So for a question like this, you could apply the 5Cs model of situational analysis. In order for a company to change its website, we need to assess the company’s 5Cs which are Company Culture, Competition, Customers, Collaborates, and Climate. Let’s apply this to some of the popular web sites below:
   —
   Craigslist — Given the wide range of users from novice to experts, significant UX redesign is required of key functions such as search, explore, post and manage posting to make them significantly simpler.
   Amazon — Over the last 10 years, this particular web site is at the risk of having too many options and too much functionality. The primary goal here will be to simplify key functions such as search, posting and assessing product credibility. Further more, an easy coherent way to access the ever growing set of Amazon services would make it simpler to increase user awareness.
9. Walk-me through case studies about your recent UX work.
   Suggestion: Use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action and Result) to provide an overview of your most recent UX work.
10. Why do you want to work here?
    Suggestion: Brand, Opportunities, Talent, Investments and Culture.
11. Can you walk me through your process to design a mobile app for buying and selling products — home screen, profile, search, checkout, etc?
    Suggestion: Again, the goal of the interviewer is to understand your thinking. So by leveraging the 5 key phased UX design approach, namely — discover, define, ideate, prototype and implement, let’s think about how to accomplish this.
    A. Discover — The key goal is to build the best and easy to use mobile app for buying and selling products so we need to study and research some of the competitors such as Amazon and also conduct UX research focused on our users and what’s important to them. Upon conducting UX research, most important features seem to be the ability to find the product that you are looking for, compare to others and purchasing the best option. Alternatively, for sellers, the most important features seem to be the ability to find similar products, compare price points, put up a product for sale and manage sales orders.
    B. Define — Develop end-to-end use cases for various common tasks, create story boards, Personas from the UX research, identify red routes and map out the entire experience journey for buyers and sellers.
    C. Ideate — Develop wireframes for various use cases, screens, application flow and the entire experience journey.
    D. Prototype — Focus on the most important features and red routes to design visual, motion and interactive prototype.
    E. Implement — Develop, deploy and test the ideas, embed analytics to measure and optimize the performance.
12. How do you begin your design process and how do you know you are on the right path?
    Suggestion: Focus on the UX design process outlined above and let the overall vision, strategy and outcome of the UX research dictate your course of action.
13. You’re working on a streaming music project that is getting ready to launch a new design. Describe how you would begin creating a plan to research the new design and what it would include.
    Suggestion: Read my article on UX research techniques (qualitative and quantitative). It talks about applying appropriate methods to identify the best approach for creating a comprehensive plan. Some of these methods include interviews, surveys, usability tests, card sorts, tree tests, A/B tests, persona generation, sample creation with appropriate confidence level and confidence interval and selecting appropriate power and p-value. Outcome of this UX research will allow you to focus on the most important aspect of your UX plan.
14. What are the design tools in your tool-belt and in what situations do you use one tool or method over another? Do you sketch with paper and pen, and will you be ready to prototype something in Sketch/Invision etc?
    Suggestion: I typically use the following tools throughout my design workflow:
    A. Discover — Trello, Google Docs, Lookback, Wufoo
    B. Define — Lucid Chart, MindMeister, Simple Card Sort
    C. Ideate — Balsamiq, Illustrator, Keynote
    D. Prototype — Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, InVision, After Effects
    E. Implement — Appium, HotJar, Google Anaytics
15. How do you know what you’re designing is tailored for the user? Can you talk a little bit about personas, usability testing, or grounding your design in some kind of data (qualitative or quantitative?)
    Suggestions: Personas are groups of individuals that demonstrate a similar pattern of behavior in terms of their usage, interaction and relationship with the product. Developing specific personas for your product, allows you to relentlessly focus on the core types of users who will be your target audience. Once these personas are developed, usability tests can be conducted using a variety of tools and analytics such as Appium, HotJar, Google Analytics. Typically there are three types of usability tests — moderated, unmoderated and guerrilla tests. On the more quantitative side, conducting customer segmenting, sampling with the appropriate confidence level, confidence internal, p-value and power allows you provide a reasonable coverage across your targeted population.
16. Do you know why responsive design matters?
    Suggestion: Given the recent explosion in the different types of devices, platforms and displays that are being used by consumers, it’s become increasingly important for product teams to develop a fluid user experience that responds well to each user’s particular device. Lack of responsive design could result in a significant drop in user engagement, sales, customer loyalty and brand popularity.
17. Do you have an opinion on flat vs skeuomorphic design?
    Suggestion: Both have their own place. For UX designs that are more focused on getting a task done without the interface being obvious, a flat, interface-less design provides an avenue to product clean and unobtrusive design. However, in the virtual reality and mixed reality worlds, where “presence” and “realism” have more significance, a skeumorphic design may have more appeal and relevance.
18. How do you go about conducting research about some of the competitors of the company you are interviewing with and present your thoughts on their designs?
    Suggestion: I would identify top 5 competitors, run the 5Cs situational analysis framework on each of the companies and perform SWOT analysis on each of their top products.
19. What kind of usability testing methods have you applied in your projects?
    Suggestion: Please read my article on UX research methods
20. How do you know when your design is “done”?
    Suggestion: UX Design is inherently an iterative process so the question isn’t necessarily, “is the design done”, but more appropriately, the question should be, “what is our overall roadmap and what is our immediate priority for this iteration so we can draw a line in the sand”.
21. Have you created personas before? How did they help you?
    Suggestion: Personas are groups of individuals that demonstrate a similar pattern of behavior in terms of their usage, interaction and relationship with the product. Developing specific personas for your product, allows you to relentlessly focus on the core types of users who will be your target audience. Once these personas are developed, usability tests can be conducted using a variety of tools and analytics such as Appium, HotJar, Google Analytics.
22. What kind of data have you used to validate a design?
    Suggestion: Data used for inform and validate a design is different based on the stage of the design process as follows:
    A. Discover — Requirements Traceability Metrics
    B. Define —Use Case Metrics, Persona Metrics, Red Route Metrics
    C. Ideate — Usability Metrics, Accessiblity Metrics, Efficiency Metrics
    D. Prototype — Usability Metrics, Accessiblity Metrics, Efficiency Metrics
    E. Implement —User Metrics, Net Promoter Score, Downloads, Revenue
23. What’s your favorite product or app and how would you improve it?
    Suggestion: Since most people talk about Facebook or Spotify or Instagram, let me try something different and say that one of recent favorites is a Poker app by Zynga one of the most successful mobile gaming in recent times. It’s not my favorite just for the way it looks but I am quite impressed by the whole academic of user behavior psychology packed into the app e.g. they focus on the concept of micro-moments, micro-emotions and micro-wins extremely well. They know that in order for users to keep coming back to the app, the users need to feel engaged, delighted and experience the elevated feeling of winning semi-frequently. I believe the app does it beautifully.
24. Who’s the most important person in the design process? Why?
25. When someone on your team or your boss or your customer/user, says, “Hey, I don’t like this design”, what do you do?
26. Given a situation where there’s not enough time to research, what do you do? How do you make appropriate decisions?
27. What was your most successful project and why?
28. Can you give me an example of a project where you failed and how did you turn it around or what did you do?
29. How would you re-design a frequently used real-world object? ATM? Street Signs? Parking Meters? Bus Stops?
30. What kind of research did you do (qualitative or quantitative)? What did you learn? What was most surprising? What is your experience with any of these methods: ethnography, focus groups/group discussions, one-on-one interviewing, contextual inquiry, eye tracking, observational research, etc.
31. How did you hand off to engineering?
32. Have you created personas before? How did they help you?
33. What kind of data have you used to validate a design?
34. Imagine that we want to make our website responsive. How would you approach this?
35. Can you describe a time when the requirements changed in the middle of a project, and how you handled that?
36. Have you worked in a lean or agile process before? How so?
37. If you design something and a developer told you “we can’t do that,” what would you do?
38. Have you given feedback on someone else’s designs before? What about receiving feedback?
39. How would your teammates describe you as someone to work with
40. Describe the Internet to someone who just woke up from a 30-year coma.
41. Explain to a 10 year old what user experience design means
42. What are the biggest tech innovations or trends right now that you think we should apply to our industry?
43. Estimation questions like Can you estimate how many traffic lights there are in America?
44. How do you balance design aesthetic with revenue-generating activities on a website?
45. What are the basic philosophies or principles that inform your designs?
46. What questions do you need answered before you start designing an experience?
47. How do you balance the goals of the end user with those of the business?
48. How do you stay current on UX innovations?
    Suggestion: UXBooth, Dribbble, Smashing and DesignModo.
49. What is the difference between responsive and adaptive design?
    Suggestion: The short version is that a responsive design reacts to the size of the browser at any given point in time and changes the layout as the browser width shifts and changes. On the other hand, adaptive design, changes the layout at specific breakpoints.
50. What are some of the UX designs that inspire you?
    Suggestion: Julie Zhuo (Facebook), Daniel Burka (Google Ventures), Bo Ren(Facebook), Ximena Vengoechea (LinkedIn), and Frank Yoo (Lyft)
51. Show me a design example where you set out to solve a business problem.
52. Describe p-value
53. Suppose that you are using eye tracking on a cross-eyed participant and the calibration cannot be successful. What do you do?
54. What is your best skill as a UX designer and what advice would you give to someone who is trying to learn this skill?
55. How would you conduct user interviews if you were trying test a particular interaction?
56. Imagine you have 3 different UIs and you want to know which one is best. What would you do?
57. Imagine that a team of engineers want to know why certain users aren’t engaging with a particular push feature. They plan to conduct a survey with six yes/no questions and one question that can be answered via [a] text box. What would you tell them about their plan?
58. If you had two products and had to ask one question of users to determine which they preferred more, what would you ask?
59. What are the weaknesses of personas? How do you overcome those weaknesses?
60. Think about an app you like to use. Suppose the product manager tells you that he wants you to find the top 10 UX issues. How would you go about this?
61. How do you handle it when people are skeptical of the value of usability research?
62. Suppose you come forward with a usability recommendation, and the engineers counter that with, “All the usage data we have from millions of people suggest that is not a problem.” How would you respond?
63. What types of people (e.g. job types) do you interact with on a regular basis?
64. Design a study for an in-vehicle phone keypad
65. How would you determine a metric for engagement?
66. Define metrics for measuring fun and satisfaction for a mobile maps product
67. What’s the difference between a Persona and a Market Segment?
68. How do you know if you are asking the right research questions for a project?
69. How do you know when a project is “done”?
70. How would you design an engagement metric for a job website?
71. How would you conduct a user experiment centered on using email? And how would you protect a user’s content if they chose to use their personal email during the experiment?
72. You’re working on a streaming music project that is getting ready to launch a new design. Describe how you would begin creating a plan to research the new design and what it would include.
73. Assume you are an Amazon engineer. The review scores of Amazon items are sometimes biased, because people usually give a score only if they strongly like it or strongly dislike it. How would you know if the review score of a given item is biased or not?
74. What are the areas for improvement on Amazon.com?
75. How would you improve UX on Amazon.com?
76. How would you conduct a UX research study to improve UX on Amazon page with books?
77. When users are navigating through the Amazon website, they are performing several actions. What is the best way to model if their next action would be a purchase?
78. What is the most challenging part in your research projects?
79. What is your experience with Amazon website? How will you improve it?
80. What was a challenging problem you had to solve and how did you solve it?
81. Think of your favorite app. How would you go about studying decreased engagement for that app? What would you tell Project Managers about why you chose that research method?
82. What would you consider one of the most difficult challenges you’ve had as a researcher?
83. What would you tell someone if they came to you and said that they wanted a bigger sample size for interviews or a survey?
84. How would you monetize one of the research projects listed on your CV?
85. Pitch a new product and how you would research it.
86. Why do you want to work for Facebook? What are some UX studies you would want to conduct?
87. Name one feature/component of the Facebook interface that a competitor does better. Why?
88. Pick a favorite app. Tell us how you’d evaluate it?
89. Share a project you completed in which you feel you made an impact or [one] that had a “social impact”.
90. How would you communicate your findings to different stakeholders?
    Propose a research question and research design. Explain how it is useful for Facebook and interesting to you.
91. Explain a time that you had to persuade your manager [to approve] a particular design idea.
92. Someone on the team has a strong opinion about how a certain feature should be designed, but you disagree that it is a good user experience. How do you approach the situation?
93. What aspect of you[r] education prepared you for this role?
94. How did you convince your team to follow your directions?
95. What did you do when the team disagreed with you?
96. Identify and explain a newly redesigned feature of the software that had a UX issue in the previous version…[and then] describe an alternative design plan for the same.
97. What would you say will be the next big trend in the UX Design industry?
98. Can you talk more about inclusive design? What is your approach to making websites and platforms accessible to all user groups, including users with visual, hearing, and motor disabilities?
99. What have you done to ensure your design is scalable and adaptable for localization or regional specific changes?
100. How do you estimate the amount of effort it’s going to take?