Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Usability Testing and Iteration
Covers the end to end practices for evaluating and improving the usability of products and documentation through iterative user research. Topics include designing task based usability tests, defining success metrics (for example task success rate, time on task, error rate, satisfaction scores), recruiting representative participants, writing moderated and unmoderated test scripts, running in person and remote sessions, and synthesizing qualitative and quantitative findings. Also covers split testing and variant experiments, analytics and event tracking to validate behavioral changes, collecting and prioritizing feedback loops from support and field teams, and planning iterative content or product updates. Candidates should be able to explain examples of test design, participant screening criteria, moderation approach, findings synthesis, decision criteria for changes, how they balanced user feedback with business constraints, and how they measured post release impact. For documentation specific testing, include approaches to measure task completion using docs, A versus B documentation variations, documentation search and discoverability metrics, and examples of content revision driven by user observation and usage data.
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.
Visual Design Principles and Systems
Covers foundational visual design principles and the applied practices for creating consistent, accessible, and scalable visual interfaces and design systems. Core topics include visual hierarchy, balance, contrast, alignment, composition, spacing, grid systems, gestalt principles, and use of white space to guide attention and readability. Typography topics include type scale, font selection and pairing, line length, line height, and responsive typographic systems. Color topics include palette creation, semantic color usage, contrast considerations, and accessible color choices that support readability and state signaling. Cover iconography, imagery treatment, motion and microinteraction considerations, and how these elements support usability and affordances. Emphasize design system practices such as creating reusable components, design tokens, naming conventions, documentation, versioning, governance, and strategies for maintaining visual consistency across screens, states, and product variations. Include accessibility considerations such as color contrast guidelines, legible typography, focus states, and support for assistive technologies. Candidates should be able to explain rationales and trade offs between aesthetics and usability, how visual decisions scale across platforms and responsive breakpoints, how to collaborate with engineers and product teams for handoff, and methods for validating visual decisions through user testing and metrics.
Simplifying Complexity
Evaluates the ability to transform complex domain logic, workflows, or organizational constraints into intuitive and elegant user experiences. Topics include mapping and prioritizing user journeys, reducing cognitive load through information architecture and progressive disclosure, designing decision support and defaults, and measuring reductions in error rates or task time.
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.
Portfolio Presentation and Impact
This topic assesses a candidate's ability to select, present, and defend their strongest design work at a senior level. Interviewers expect a deep dive into two to three representative projects that together show breadth and depth: varied problem types, user contexts, and levels of complexity. For each project, be prepared to explain the problem context and goals, research and discovery methods used, your design approach and rationale, how you evaluated trade offs and handled complexity, decisions about scope and prioritization, collaboration with cross functional partners, handoff and implementation details, measurable outcomes and impact, and the lessons learned. Candidates should demonstrate strategic thinking, influence and leadership, design craft, ability to drive outcomes, and clear storytelling using artifacts and artifacts annotations. Emphasize the why behind decisions, constraints you faced, the degree of your ownership, and how the work scaled or informed broader product direction.
User Flow and Wireframing
Covers mapping end to end user journeys and translating those journeys into clear wireframes. Candidates should demonstrate how to document entry points, decision points, alternative paths, successful task completion, error states and recovery, and edge cases. They should show task flows that break down user goals into discrete steps and explain how the design reduces friction and supports intuitive progress. Wireframing expectations include layout, visual hierarchy, interaction affordances, component relationships, readable annotation, and use of standard notation to show navigation and state changes. Also includes communicating design intent for handoff, accessibility considerations, and rationale for layout and interaction choices.
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.