Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Usability and User Centric Testing
Evaluating product usability and designing tests that focus on real user needs. Candidates should consider end to end user workflows, accessibility and assistive technology considerations, clarity and tone of error and help messages, task success and time on task metrics, persona driven scenarios, and heuristics for reducing cognitive load. Discuss methods such as exploratory sessions with representative users, remote usability studies, heuristic evaluation, and user acceptance criteria, and how to translate usability findings into test cases and acceptance checks.
Accessibility and Inclusive Design
Design and development practices that ensure digital products are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for people with diverse abilities, assistive technologies, and usage contexts. Candidates should demonstrate knowledge of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and conformance levels such as A, AA, and AAA and be able to explain how to apply those guidelines in product work. Core technical topics include using semantic Hypertext Markup Language structure and accessible component patterns, prudent use of Accessible Rich Internet Applications roles properties and states only when native semantics are insufficient, and progressive enhancement to preserve accessibility. Interaction topics include keyboard navigation and comprehensive focus management, logical tab order, visible focus indicators, touch target sizing, and mobile accessibility. Visual topics include color contrast, readable typographic scales, and accommodation for color blindness and low vision. Content topics include alternative text and descriptive labels for images and media, accessible form controls with labels and clear error messaging, and plain accessible language. Motion and animation considerations include providing controls to reduce or disable motion for vestibular sensitivities. Testing and validation cover automated auditing tools, manual accessibility audits, keyboard only testing, assistive technology testing such as screen reader and magnifier testing, and usability testing with people with disabilities. Candidates should be prepared to discuss specific accessibility decisions and trade offs they made, testing strategies and metrics, monitoring and preventing regressions, and how accessibility is integrated into design systems team workflows and the product lifecycle through documented patterns acceptance criteria and advocacy.
Findings Presentation and Impact
Ability to clearly present research findings, articulate key insights, and discuss how findings influenced product decisions. Understanding of how to communicate research results to different audiences. Demonstrated ability to translate findings into actionable recommendations.
Accessibility and Usability Principles
Knowledge and application of accessibility and usability principles across the design process, including planning, prototyping, testing, and delivery. Candidates should be able to explain core usability heuristics such as consistency, feedback, simplicity, discoverability, and error prevention and recovery. They should also demonstrate understanding of accessibility standards and best practices including WCAG guidelines, semantic markup and ARIA roles, keyboard navigation and focus management, color contrast and perceptual considerations, readable labels and form accessibility, and compatibility with assistive technologies such as screen readers. Describe how accessibility and usability are integrated early into workflows: design systems and component libraries, accessibility acceptance criteria, automated and manual testing, user testing with diverse participants, and iterative fixes from research findings. For interfaces with real time behavior, discuss additional considerations such as timely feedback, state synchronization, announcement strategies for dynamic updates, performance and latency impacts on accessibility, and graceful degradation for users with limited bandwidth or assistive tools. Expect examples of concrete decisions, tradeoffs, metrics used to measure accessibility and usability, and stories showing how designs were improved through testing and remediation.