Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Responsive Design and Mobile First
Comprehensive understanding of responsive web design and the mobile first design approach, covering the full set of techniques used to make interfaces adapt across mobile, tablet, and desktop devices. Candidates should explain the rationale for designing mobile first and progressive enhancement, use of the viewport meta tag, and how to select and apply breakpoints. Core layout skills include fluid and flexible layouts, grid systems, and layout techniques such as Flexbox and Cascading Style Sheets Grid. Candidates should be familiar with relative sizing using percentages, em, rem, and viewport units, and with composing media queries to alter layout and behavior across viewport sizes. Important additional topics include responsive image strategies using the picture element and srcset and sizes attributes, support for high density or retina displays, touch friendly interaction patterns, accessibility considerations across devices and input types, performance implications for mobile networks, testing strategies across device sizes and browsers, and newer features such as container queries and aspect ratio controls when applicable.
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.
Responsive and CSS Design
Focuses on building adaptable, maintainable user interfaces across devices and screen sizes using CSS and responsive design principles. Topics include mobile first and adaptive strategies, media queries, fluid and relative units, responsive images and picture sources, layout techniques using Flexbox and CSS Grid, responsive typography and spacing, component breakpoints and adaptive components, writing efficient and maintainable styles with methodologies like BEM or CSS in JS, CSS custom properties for theming, handling interactive states and accessible focus styles, performance considerations for layout and animations, and how responsive work intersects with accessibility (touch targets, readable text, focus management). Candidates should be ready to explain implementation details, trade offs, and examples of responsive patterns they used.
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.
User Interface and User Experience Design
Covers the principles and execution of designing intuitive, usable, and polished digital interfaces. Topics include visual design fundamentals such as layout, visual hierarchy, typography, color, spacing, and contrast; accessibility considerations including color contrast, keyboard navigation, labeling, and assistive technology support; component and pattern design for consistent reusable interfaces; form design, navigation, and information architecture that guide user flows; interaction design and microinteraction practices including states for hover, focus, active, disabled, loading, and error, as well as feedback patterns and motion to communicate system status; handling edge cases and error states gracefully; responsive and platform specific design considerations; prototyping, design to implementation handoff, and basic usability validation and metrics. Candidates should be prepared to explain design decisions, demonstrate familiarity with trade offs between aesthetics and usability, and discuss how interaction details improve task completion and user satisfaction.
Frontend Fundamentals
Demonstrate foundational knowledge of frontend web technologies and constraints relevant to product and design decisions. Topics include layout systems such as flexbox and grid, responsive breakpoints and mobile considerations, browser compatibility and rendering implications, animation and performance trade offs, accessibility markup and semantics, and effective communication and handoff with frontend engineers. The goal is pragmatic awareness of what is technically feasible, common pitfalls, and how frontend constraints influence design choices.
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.
Visual Design Craft and Aesthetics
Deep evaluation of visual craft: typography systems and scale, color theory and accessible contrast, spacing and grid systems, iconography and imagery, visual hierarchy and composition, and attention to detail that creates polish. Candidates should be able to articulate why specific aesthetic choices support usability and product goals, discuss trade offs between visual style and clarity, demonstrate systems that keep consistent visual language across screens, and show examples or critique work to reveal signal about taste and craft. Accessibility, localization, and brand consistency are part of this competency.
Junior Designer Role
Assess understanding of junior designer responsibilities including executing visual and interaction design tasks, collaborating with UX designers and engineers, maintaining design consistency, working with design systems, iterating on feedback, and focusing on execution and learning rather than strategy or mentorship. Candidates should set realistic expectations about scope, growth, and the balance between learning and delivery.