Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Responsive Design and Device Strategy
Covers designing user interfaces and front end architectures that adapt gracefully across a wide range of screen sizes and device types. Topics include breakpoint strategy, fluid and adaptive layout patterns, component adaptation rules, progressive enhancement, handling single column to multi column transitions, touch and pointer interactions, performance implications for mobile versus tablet and desktop, and accessibility considerations. At senior levels include how to scale responsive approaches across teams and products: design systems and component libraries that enforce responsive behavior, guidelines for consistency, testing strategies across form factors, build and release coordination, and measuring success through metrics such as perceived performance and device specific engagement.
State Management and Data Flow
Comprehensive coverage of strategies and patterns for managing application state and the flow of data in user interfaces and across system boundaries. Topics include local component state, derived state, and decisions about lifting state versus keeping it local; unidirectional data flow and event based updates; context providers and dependency injection for sharing state; and external state containers and libraries. Candidates should be able to explain criteria for selecting a solution based on application complexity, rendering performance, network characteristics, scalability, and team familiarity, and describe trade offs introduced by different libraries and architectures. Core engineering techniques include predictable state updates through immutability and pure update functions, minimizing duplicated and derived state, normalizing state shape, and designing for testability and debuggability. Synchronization concerns cover caching strategies and staleness models, when to refetch versus rely on cached data, optimistic and pessimistic update patterns and reconciliation, conflict resolution, and consistency across distributed front ends and server side systems. Also include considerations for rendering performance, concurrency, server side rendering, instrumentation, and debugging patterns used to reason about state in production.
Mobile Client Architecture
Principles and patterns used to design maintainable, testable, and scalable mobile applications. Covers separation of concerns between user interface, presentation, domain, and data layers; common mobile patterns such as model view view model, model view presenter, and clean architecture; platform specific considerations such as coordinator and modular approaches on the Apple mobile platform, and feature modules on the Android mobile platform. Includes cross platform approaches such as Redux style state management for React Native and business logic component patterns for Flutter. Topics assessed include dependency injection strategies, reactive data flow and bindings, testing at each layer, performance and memory considerations, incremental modularization to support team scaling, and how architecture choices affect release cadence and maintainability.
Mobile Architecture and Design Decisions
Focus on architectural reasoning and tradeoffs for mobile applications. Candidates should be able to explain criteria for choosing state management libraries navigation frameworks data persistence solutions modularization and dependency management. Evaluation covers maintainability testability build and release implications backward compatibility and upgrade paths as well as impacts on app size performance and developer productivity. Good responses articulate tradeoffs provide cost benefit analysis and reference concrete patterns or past decision outcomes.
UIView and View Controller Architecture Problems
Problems involving complex UI rendering, view hierarchy optimization, or managing view lifecycle efficiently. May include scenarios like implementing custom views, handling view recycling (similar to Android RecyclerView), or optimizing rendering performance. Understanding of view layer caching and drawing performance.
Responsive and Multi Platform Design
Covers designing user interfaces that adapt across screen sizes and platforms, including mobile, tablet, desktop, web, and native applications. Topics include responsive thinking, mobile first strategy, adaptive versus fluid layouts, responsive grids and breakpoints, component adaptation and scalability, platform specific patterns and conventions (for example iOS versus Android versus web), interaction differences for touch versus pointer devices, performance and accessibility considerations across viewports, and techniques for testing and validating layouts on varied devices. Interview assessment focuses on how candidates make layout and component tradeoffs, choose breakpoints and scaling rules, maintain visual and interaction consistency while respecting platform constraints, and communicate responsive solutions to engineers and stakeholders.
Frontend State and Data Architecture
Designing scalable frontend application architecture and managing application state and data flow across large code bases. Covers component hierarchy, folder and module organization, separation of concerns, and patterns for composing UIs so they remain maintainable as the application grows. Includes evaluating and selecting state management approaches such as centralized stores versus local component state, context based mechanisms, and third party state libraries; explaining trade offs among options, strategies to avoid prop drilling, techniques for lifting state up, and patterns for predictable data flow. Also covers data persistence concerns within frontend applications including local storage, client side databases, serialization and hydration, handling configuration changes and process restarts, caching strategies, offline support, synchronization with remote back ends, optimistic updates, side effect management, testing of stateful code, and approaches to incrementally migrate or modularize state in large teams.
Mobile User Interface Implementation and Responsiveness
Designing and building mobile user interfaces that adapt and perform well across different screen sizes, pixel densities, orientations, and device form factors. Core skills include mastery of platform layout systems and idioms such as constraint based layouts, declarative UI frameworks, and responsive layout primitives; handling device rotation and configuration changes while preserving UI state; implementing adaptive and fluid layouts for phones, tablets, foldables, and multiwindow modes; accessibility considerations including proper semantics, focus order, contrast, and scalable text; touch and gesture handling, hit targets, and input responsiveness; performance optimization for rendering, view hierarchies, and animations; safe area and inset handling, resolution and density independence, and support for platform specific patterns on Apple iOS, Google Android, and cross platform frameworks. Candidates may also be evaluated on testing and debugging strategies for UI, using layout inspectors, automated UI tests, and strategies for progressively enhanced designs.
Mobile Image and Media Handling
Designing and implementing efficient strategies for loading, processing, caching, storing, and delivering images and other media on resource constrained mobile devices. Key areas include memory safe image decoding and rendering, in memory and on disk caching strategies and eviction policies, adaptive image resolution and format selection, compression and transcode strategies, thumbnail generation, progressive and lazy loading, streaming and chunked downloads, resumable transfers, handling very large files, disk quota and storage management, background transfers and battery impact, integration with content delivery networks and remote storage, security and permission considerations for media access, support for offline and sync scenarios, and profiling and tooling to measure memory, CPU, and network costs. Candidates may also be assessed on tradeoffs between client side and server side processing, use of hardware acceleration, and testing strategies for media correctness and performance.