UX INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Over the years I have been apart of several interview teams, and have been interviewed several times for new jobs. I realized pretty quick questions I like to have answered and the questions I like to ask. Normally during interviews, I don\‘t ask ALL of these questions. I do however treat the categories as an outline and like to make sure each category is represented befor making a hire. SO for categories like \“skills\” I can ask questions, or if their portfolio clearly answers my questions I will skip this category.

Working on teams

  • What design team size do you think is ideal? Describe the roles you would expect each person to have.

  • Describe a time when business goals or technical limitations didn\‘t align with good design or ux. How did you handle it?

  • Tell me about a time you took ownership of a product or design.

Design languages and patterns

  • If I was building an app for iOS and Android, would you recommend I design a custom experience for each platform or a consistent experience across platforms? Why? (No answer is the only wrong answer, they should be passionate about a decision, but also able to articulate the pros on the cons of both)

  • What are the pros and cons of having a style guide for a website/app?

  • Have you built a style guide from scratch?

  • Tell me about a time you uses someone else\‘s existing design language.

  • What are some differences in (or what do you like about) googles material design, apples human interface guidelines (HIG), and Microsoft\‘s metro design?

Their process

  • What is your IDEAL end to end design process?

  • What kinds of design problems do you enjoy solving

  • If you are given a timeline that doesn\‘t allow for your ideal process what do you do? (I am looking for them to push back a little, but ultimately cut parts out of their ideal process and give reason behind those decisions)

Research

  • Describe a good and bad experience you have had recruiting for user testing.

  • Tell me about your experience with qualitative research.

  • Tell me about your experience with quantitative studies.

  • How do you determine how much and what kind of data you need? when do you do a qualitative study, when do you do a quantitative study? How many participants do you need?

Skills

  • Have you built any accessible websites? describe what you and the team did. (I am looking for more than just alt tags on images, I want to hear them talking about wcag levels)

  • What tool(s) do you spend most of your time in?

  • What project are you most proud of?

Personal questions

  • I am new to UX, what book would you recommend me reading to get started? (They should have a book or two that they have recommended to other people in their organizations in the past)

  • What do you think will be the next big trend in software (or ux design)?

  • What design trend in the past few years do you think sucks?

  • Tell me about a project (or part of a project) that went wrong.