Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Research Philosophy and Alignment
Explain your research approach and how it aligns with product and design teams. Topics include preferences for exploratory versus evaluative research, quantitative and qualitative methods, synthesis and prioritization of insights, and how you integrate research into product decision making. Discuss trade offs, timelines, and how research values align with team practices.
Research Objectives and Hypothesis Formation
Understanding how to translate business or product questions into clear research objectives. Being able to discuss the difference between open-ended research (exploratory) versus hypothesis-driven research. Understanding how to frame research questions that are specific enough to answer but broad enough to uncover insights.
Participant Recruitment and Sampling
Covers strategies and operational practices for identifying, sourcing, and managing research participants to produce valid, representative samples. Topics include defining inclusion and exclusion criteria, screener design to avoid bias, quota and probability sampling approaches, recruiting channels such as internal panels, external vendors, and community outreach, incentive structures and ethical compensation, participant quality control and retention, panel and vendor management at scale, managing diversity and representativeness across concurrent studies, and articulating how recruitment limitations may influence findings. Practical skills assessed include designing recruitment plans, estimating sample needs, mitigating selection bias, balancing speed and quality, and explaining trade offs when scaling participant operations.
Usability Testing and User Research
Focuses on planning, designing, conducting, and analyzing usability studies and broader user research to surface user needs, pain points, and behavior. Candidates should know how to define research goals and questions, design tasks, recruit representative participants, choose between formative and summative approaches and moderated and unmoderated sessions, and select appropriate test formats such as in home, lab, or remote testing. Includes facilitation techniques, observation and note taking, qualitative and quantitative analysis, synthesis of findings into actionable design recommendations, and how to cite user quotes or data to support product decisions.
Taking and Implementing Feedback
Responding positively to interviewer suggestions, implementing changes gracefully, and building on feedback rather than getting defensive. Asking clarifying questions about feedback.
Research Mindset and Curiosity
Discussing any evidence of research mindset, curiosity about user behavior, collaboration experience, and ability to work with ambiguity. Even if formal research experience is limited, demonstrate problem-solving approach and interest in learning.
Research Methodology Selection and Tradeoffs
Covers how to choose, justify, and execute research and analysis methods given research questions, stakeholder needs, and real world constraints such as limited time, budget, or access to users. Candidates should be able to compare qualitative methods such as interviews, usability testing, ethnography, and diary studies with quantitative methods such as surveys, analytics, split testing, and controlled experiments, and explain when and how to combine them into mixed methods designs. The topic includes core decision criteria and trade offs including generative versus evaluative goals, depth versus breadth, speed versus rigor, sample size and power considerations, cost versus validity, internal validity versus external generalizability, and short term versus longitudinal designs. Practical skills include aligning methodology to success metrics and business objectives, scoping minimal viable research designs, selecting sampling strategies and proxies, recruitment and instrumentation choices, pilot testing, estimation of sample size for quantitative work, mitigation of bias and threats to validity, documenting limitations and uncertainty, communicating and defending methodological choices to nonresearch stakeholders, and ensuring ethical and privacy safeguards and data quality in constrained or iterative studies.
Problem Framing and Research
Covers the end to end practice of uncovering, defining, and validating the true problem before designing solutions. Includes techniques for framing ambiguous challenges, performing root cause analysis, and translating business needs into clear problem statements and research objectives. Covers designing and prioritizing research activities including stakeholder and contextual interviews, user interviews, surveys, field research, observational studies, analytics review, competitive and market analysis, and selecting appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods and sample considerations. Emphasizes hypothesis driven research, rapid prototypes and experiments, ethical practice, and using analytics to validate insights. Describes how to set clear success criteria and key performance indicators, surface stakeholder assumptions and constraints, convert vague needs into testable research questions and hypotheses, and produce deliverables such as research plans, personas, user journeys, empathy maps, prioritized findings, and actionable recommendations that inform decisions and design goals.
Research Insight Synthesis and Communication
The ability to convert raw qualitative and quantitative research into concise, evidence based insights and to translate those insights into concrete design directions and product recommendations. This includes methods for organizing messy data, performing thematic analysis, identifying patterns and opportunities, and synthesizing findings into artifacts such as user personas, user journey maps, experience maps, insight frameworks, and research reports. Candidates should be able to communicate findings clearly to cross functional stakeholders through storytelling, presentations, workshops, and documented handoffs, and to recommend prioritized next steps and measurable outcomes. Emphasis is placed on linking insights to specific design decisions, trade offs, or roadmap items and on demonstrating impact when possible. Senior candidates should show cross study synthesis, strategic implications of the research, and the ability to influence roadmap and business strategy based on research evidence.