Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
User Experience Design Fundamentals and Role
Covers core user experience design concepts and a clear understanding of the role of a user experience designer. Candidates should be able to explain what user experience design is and why it matters, differentiate user experience from user interface design, and describe the designer s philosophy and approach to solving user problems. Includes knowledge of the design thinking process, problem framing, user research methods, information architecture, interaction design, wireframing, prototyping, and usability testing. Also assesses how designers collaborate with product managers, engineers, and visual designers, how they communicate research insights and design decisions to stakeholders, and how they articulate user centered design trade offs in simple, non technical language.
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.
Designing for Real World Contexts
Evaluates the ability to design robust experiences that work in realistic environmental conditions such as mobility, noise, intermittent attention, and variable connectivity. Candidates should describe strategies for handling interrupted workflows, rapid decision making, safety and accessibility in context, progressive disclosure, and offline or degraded modes, and show how they validated those approaches through field research or contextual testing. This topic also covers designing microinteractions and feedback that reduce cognitive load and support fast, reliable user actions in constrained settings.
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.
Progressive Disclosure and Audience Design
Covers the principles and practices of structuring information for multiple audiences by using progressive disclosure to manage cognitive load. Candidates should be able to explain the theory of progressive disclosure, why limiting initial information reduces cognitive load, and when to reveal additional details on demand. This includes concrete strategies for serving beginners and advanced users or different roles and use cases within the same product documentation or interface: layered content (overview then details), summaries with expandable details, quick start guides, step by step tutorials, reference sections, role specific landing pages, contextual help, tooltips, and example driven content. Discuss design tradeoffs such as discoverability versus simplicity, maintaining consistency, versioning and referenceability, and accessibility considerations. Describe how to identify audience needs through personas, user research, and analytics, and how to structure navigation and information architecture so users can find the level of detail they need. Be prepared to give examples of implementation patterns, explain when progressive disclosure is inappropriate, and describe metrics to evaluate success such as task completion, time on task, support volume, heatmaps, and user feedback.
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.
Comfort with Ambiguity and Iteration
Show the ability to operate effectively when requirements are incomplete or changing. Candidates should explain how they shape vague problems into testable hypotheses, run rapid experiments and prototypes, gather and synthesize feedback from users and stakeholders, and iterate until the solution converges. Good responses show composure under uncertainty, a learning mindset, and concrete examples where iteration improved outcomes.