Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
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.
User Personas and Journey Mapping
Covers the end to end practice of creating research grounded user personas and journey maps that synthesize qualitative and quantitative data into actionable artifacts that guide product and design decisions. Candidates should demonstrate research methods and synthesis techniques such as interviews, surveys, analytics analysis, contextual inquiry, affinity mapping, and empathy mapping, and show how to triangulate evidence to define user segments and persona attributes including goals, motivations, behaviors, pain points, constraints, context of use, and validation evidence. The topic includes structuring personas so they are usable by product and design teams while avoiding stereotyping, documenting use cases, and linking personas to success metrics and validation approaches. For journey mapping, candidates should be able to map flows and scenarios across timelines or stages, identify touchpoints, channels, emotional states, key moments of truth, pain points, opportunities, and barriers to conversion or product use, and link journey artifacts to service blueprints and operational considerations. Also assessed are practices for prioritizing opportunities, iterating and validating artifacts with users, running cross functional workshops, communicating findings to stakeholders, tooling and deliverable formats, storytelling and visualization choices, using artifacts to inform requirements testing and metrics, and examples of how personas and journey maps changed product direction.
User Research and User Centered Design
Covers the full practice of grounding design decisions in evidence about users. Topics include research methodologies such as user interviews, surveys, contextual inquiry, usability testing, analytics review, split testing, competitive analysis, and observational studies; creating and using personas, user journeys, and mental models; synthesizing qualitative and quantitative findings into actionable insights; validating designs and hypotheses through testing and measurement; ideation and iterative design cycles that respond to research findings; and practical considerations across levels from junior basics through mid level independent planning and senior strategy for integrating research into product workflows.
End to End Design Process
Covers owning and executing a complete design effort from an initial brief through launch and iteration. Candidates should demonstrate problem definition from ambiguous requirements, scoping, and prioritization; planning and conducting or synthesizing user research; identifying user pain points, needs, personas, and journeys; generating multiple solution directions and ideation methods; creating wireframes, user flows, and information architecture; building prototypes at appropriate fidelity; running usability testing or other feedback sessions and synthesizing findings; iterating on designs based on evidence; collaborating with product management and engineering on implementation details and tradeoffs; preparing handoff documentation and design specifications; considering accessibility, performance, and maintainability; and defining success metrics and measuring post launch outcomes. Emphasize how each phase informs the next and how decisions were justified given constraints, stakeholders, and technical considerations.
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 & Need Identification
Even in a time-constrained design challenge, show your research mindset. What questions would you ask? What assumptions need validation? How would you learn about user needs if time allowed? Demonstrate respect for research and evidence-based design.