Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Success Metrics, KPIs & Problem Statement Framing
Establishing how you'll measure success for your design work (task completion rate, time to complete, user satisfaction, adoption rate, engagement metrics, retention). Framing the design problem clearly as a user-centered challenge connected to business goals. Creating a concise problem statement that guides design thinking.
User Research Methods and Execution
Covers end to end planning, design, and operationalization of user research studies and the concrete skills needed to collect and analyze user data. Candidates should be able to define research goals and hypotheses tied to product or business objectives; select appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods such as user interviews, contextual inquiry, diary studies, ethnographic observation, moderated and unmoderated usability testing, prototype testing, card sorting, surveys, cohort and analytics analysis, heatmap and session recording review; design screening criteria and sample size and recruitment strategies; create moderation guides, scripts, and test tasks; run studies in person and remotely; capture, transcribe, and code observations; apply analysis techniques such as thematic coding, affinity mapping, triangulation, and basic statistical checks; synthesize findings into artifacts such as personas, user journeys, jobs to be done, pain points, and prioritized recommendations; surface limitations and bias and validate findings; practice ethical research including informed consent and data privacy; and manage operational constraints such as timeline, budget, and participant access. For senior candidates include designing research strategies, defining appropriate power and sampling trade offs, creating reproducible study templates and processes, mentoring others, and describing how research choices and analysis techniques informed product or documentation decisions.
Ideation and Prototyping
Focuses on generating, exploring, validating, and communicating multiple design concepts through rapid and deliberate prototyping. Candidates should demonstrate ideation techniques, breadth and speed of divergent thinking, explicit decision criteria for converging on a direction, and justification of chosen concepts based on user needs, technical feasibility, and business impact. This topic includes rapid sketching, wireframing, and creating low and high fidelity prototypes; practices for iterating based on user and stakeholder feedback; validation strategies such as usability testing and metrics; and trade off analysis between alternatives. It also covers prototype craftsmanship and developer hand off including interaction specifications, user flows, micro interactions, animations, error states, edge cases, performance considerations, visual polish, and effective communication of prototypes to stakeholders and engineers.
Design Process and Design Thinking
Covers user centered design processes and design thinking approaches used to solve product and user experience problems. Candidates should be able to describe discovery and research activities, synthesize insights to identify user needs and constraints, frame problems and hypotheses, and translate research into measurable requirements and success metrics. This topic includes familiarity with research methods such as surveys, interviews, contextual inquiry, and usability testing; mapping techniques such as journey maps and personas; and approaches for incorporating quantitative and qualitative feedback. Interviewers will evaluate knowledge of design frameworks and methodologies, split testing for validation, accessibility and inclusive design, maintaining and scaling design systems, agile design practices, collaboration and hand off to product managers and engineers, stakeholder alignment and management, and measuring business and user impact. Senior level expectations include scaling processes across teams, mentoring and coaching designers, adapting process to constraints, and demonstrating how process choices influenced outcomes and metrics.
Design Analysis and Critique
Assess the ability to evaluate existing product or interface designs critically and constructively. Skills include identifying usability issues, articulating strengths and weaknesses, evaluating interaction flows, accessibility and visual clarity, judging alignment with user needs and business goals, proposing prioritized improvements, and explaining design rationale. Candidates should be comfortable performing heuristic evaluations, situational critiques, and communicating feedback clearly to cross functional partners while balancing user value, technical feasibility, and business impact.
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.
Interaction and User Journey Design
Focuses on the end to end design of how users interact with a product, covering the full user journey and the sequence of steps required to complete tasks. Includes mapping user flows and task flows, identifying decision points and state changes, and handling loading states, error states, failures, recovery paths, and edge cases. Emphasizes navigation and information architecture, transitions and microinteractions, feedback and affordances, and how the interface communicates system status to users. Requires consideration of accessibility and inclusive design, progressive disclosure, and adaptation of interactions across devices and contexts. Candidates should be able to produce and explain deliverables such as annotated flow diagrams, wireframes, prototypes, state tables, and acceptance criteria, justify trade offs and simplifications based on user goals and constraints, and describe how they would test and iterate flows using usability feedback and metrics. Evaluation focuses on holistic thinking across the journey, attention to detail in interaction behavior, and clarity of specifications and documentation for handoff to engineering.
End To End Research Problem Solving
Demonstrate ability to work through complete research projects from problem definition to actionable recommendations. Walk through how you would scope a research question, select appropriate methodologies, plan execution, analyze findings, and communicate recommendations. Show how research activities connect to each other and build toward insights. Discuss how you determine what research is needed and what is out of scope.
User Understanding and Empathy
Focuses on the ability to deeply understand users, build empathy across teams, and ensure user needs drive product decisions. Topics include user research methods such as interviews, surveys, observation, usability testing, and analysis; creation and use of artifacts like personas, user journey maps, empathy maps, and problem framing; synthesizing insights into actionable requirements; and communicating user needs compellingly to influence stakeholders. Candidates should provide examples of how they brought users into design conversations, prioritized user pain points, and measured impact on user experience. Senior candidates should show how they fostered a user centered culture and scaled research and empathy practices across teams.