UX Designer Interview Preparation Guide

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A category is a way of adding additional methods to a class without extending it. It is often used to add a collection of related methods. A common use case is to add additional methods to built in classes in the Cocoa frameworks. For example adding async download methods to the UIImage class.

This is the most simple question and a crucial one to answer. With this question, the employer will get to know the motivation and the drive for you to be in this area of work. As a UI designer, what are the crucial aspects you like about it from user testing to designing new layouts and creating interesting visual language, anything which can hook you up in it will be the best answer.

UI design is not an art, it requires not only design acumen but a business mindset to deliver the best results. While answering this question, ensure to back them up with relevant and strong examples and reasoning as to why a specific part of UI design attracts you. Include how you ensure to keep up to date on it and how you intend to improvise on to make it better day by day.

An employer will ask you this question to try and see how committed you are to the industry – and how seriously you actually take your role. A great answer here might be to say that you’re part of lots of LinkedIn UX groups and actively take part in discussions and you also read popular UX blogs such as UXHow, UXMatters and Usability Geek every week.

Everyone has a different design process (and that’s okay). What will matter is your ability to describe your process and explain the rationale behind your approach. It’s a good idea to have a standard ‘go-to’ process in mind, yet it’s important to acknowledge your design context. Different UX situations inevitably call for different UX processes. It’s a strength to understand your environment and determine a process that’s best fits for your situation.

Ask your interviewer for specifics. Respond to a particular design problem the company is facing or talk about a process you have used in a particular situation.

Through all my processes, my one constant is to ask the right questionsbefore designing. It frames the way I approach a problem and guides me toward the appropriate UX strategy and tools going forward.

The answer needs to mention the core concerns that a UI designer faces in day to day work. UI design is quite a challenging time because every day something new is coming up in the web world and keeping up with that regularly requires immense attentiveness to the information. A new button, link, scrolling, icons which keep the user interested. Knowing what will attract the user and keep them hooked to it regularly is one of the biggest challenges they have. A UI design talk never goes without talking about web forms.

Understanding what will work best is of utmost important. The client differences is a challenge which every designer face. Talking about how these differences are bridged keeping in mind the client requirement along with the design value and aesthetics of the product.

Having self-awareness of how you work and demonstrating flexibility is key. Consider the company you’re interviewing with — the size, what you know about the culture, and how you might fit into work dynamics. Also be true to yourself. The interviewer will be looking for how you play with others and determine if you’re a good culture fit.

When thinking about this question, I sometimes draw a graph mapping out my energy levels throughout the day. I’ve discovered I like ‘heads-down’ time in the morning, collaborative time after lunch, (snacks throughout the day) and time to consume content and find inspiration in the late afternoons. I try to balance my own patterns while being aware of others and the dynamics around me.

As a UI designer, they are one of the crucial members of a team built by UX designer, developer and much more. While answering this question, one need to mention how a day begins with discussing with the team about the work, problem, key areas to focus on. This will provide an idea that a UI designer is a team player and is in constant touch with their team to build an effective design.

They need to mention about how they visualize the idea and how to plan to achieve it. Understanding the limitations and the concerns in the design, especially after discussing with the UX designer. How they plan to tackle these issues with an effective result. Also, don’t forget to allot some time in your day, to read about the newer developments happening in the industry.

Needless to say an employer will ask you this question to try and determine how serious you are about the role and the company. Again, the right answer will depend on your personal situation – but it’s important to avoid citing reasons which could be seen as purely selfish eg. amazing salary, excellent benefits or 30 days holiday a year. Why? Because while they might be the things that attracted you to the role, they also suggest that you’re only interested in what the company can do for you, rather than the other way around.

A better answer would be to say that you were keen to work for a company which has a great reputation within the user experience industry and has a great range of clients on its books – and that this role offers the perfect new challenge for your career.

When thinking about this question, consider your audience and have a range of apps/websites that can demonstrate a diversity of aspects you find important to design. When I was interviewing, I chose SquareCash, Lyft, and Meetup — all experiences I loved for different reasons.

SquareCash represented simplicity in design. It made money transactions painless and solved a problem I didn’t realize I had. Lyft represented a peer-to-peer service that was trust-worthy and delightful and leveraged local communities to foster sharing in my hometown (San Francisco) and beyond. We are what we do | Meetup represented a platform for community at scale and had provided a tribe for me no matter where I was in the world.

While touching on UI elements, try to paint a picture of your values as a designer. By choosing apps/websites that highlight your interests and elegantly solve your pains, you’ll make a memorable impression.

Every team or even no two people can have the same opinion about something. As a UI designer, it is crucial to work in a team and be a strong team player, but it is natural that differences crop up in a team. Generally, the differences tend to come up a lot between a UI and UX designer in a team, since both have a different perception of their work and they want to be the alpha in the team.

Therefore, it is important for the employer to know how the designer will manage the differences that will come up. The process of communication with the team and effectiveness of the same matters the most. So as not to hamper with the result and finding the best solution for the problems.

For young designers, this can feel like the toughest question to answer. Without a lot of design experience, what you can offer is your hustle and a proven willingness to learn. Emphasize it. And don’t just talk about it —show it. Point to personal projects, blog posts, and other forms of commitment to design that you’ve taken.

As a young designer, you’ve taken an enormous leap into a new career. Talk about this experience and share the strides you’ve taken to get to where you are now and where you want to be. You have enormous potential — be confident as you go.

The future of UI design is immense as the world is shifting more and more towards internet life, from computers to mobile phones. Each day new technology is coming up which is making the life easier for the people. As a UI designer, this question is important to answer as to how do you see yourself in coming future. This is another question for the employer as they can learn about it if you are planning to switch jobs and companies or for how long you intend to be part of the employer.

The clarity of your future gives a clear idea to the employer about your dedication, hard work and efforts you are willing to put in your work and how much of a risk taker you will be.

No matter what role you’re interviewing for, an employer will ask this question to see how much ambition you have and what type of company you see yourself working for later in your career. If you really want the job you’re interviewing for, you might want to describe yourself working at the company in a much more senior role. This shows that you’re keen to progress but that you also see yourself working at that company (or a similar one) for an extended amount of time. Whatever answer you give, it’s important to talk about a more senior role – this shows that you’re keen to progress and if they employ you, you won’t just be happy treading water.

Again, this is another question which gives the employer an insight who you are as a designer and once again, it all comes to down to individual preference. That said; it’s important not to choose tasks or processes which could potentially be described as ‘easy’. If you do, there’s a chance you could come across as lazy and work-shy. With that in mind; it can be a good idea to choose a number of tasks which range in difficulty so the employer can see that you enjoy being challenged – but try and stick to the truth as much as possible. Why? Because if you say you enjoy doing something which you absolutely hate, the employer will be none the wiser but might end up reworking the role to include more of the aspects which you said you enjoyed but actually hate – not ideal!

When users depend on scrolling as their prime method of exploring data, it may compel the user to spend more time on your web page, thus increasing engagement. With the popularity of social media, massive amounts of data are being consumed; infinite scrolling offers an efficient way to browse that ocean of information without having to wait for pages to preload.

Users tend to have better experiences with scrolling than clicking/tapping. Gesture controls on mobile devices have made scrolling intuitive and easy to use. As a result, the users enjoy a truly responsive experience, regardless of what type of device they’re using. The biggest challenge is to maintain good performance in an application or website with infinite scrolling. If we see that the app will use too many resources because of size and volume of images or other types of content, then we need to make sure we try out an alternative approach.

Pagination is a user interface pattern that divides content into separate pages.

Pagination is good when the user is searching for something specific within listed content, not just scanning and consuming the flow of information. Furthermore, the user gets a sense of control. Infinite scrolling is like an endless game, while pagination allows us to visually sort different items. This means that if the user was searching for something on a website then he will quite easily find the necessary information on a paginated interface. Pagination is good for e-commerce sites and apps. When users shop online, they want to be able to come back to the place they left off and continue their shopping.

Pokemon Go changed the rules of the game and created a new trend in mobile design and gaming. The combination of Augmented Reality (AR) and flexibility provided by smartphone platforms helped create a whole new user experience. These emerging technologies will bring monumental changes to digital product design.

The gaps between smart devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops, wearables) are being blurred with each consecutive product generation. Rapidly evolving hardware is bringing AR closer to mainstream users, even though the concept has been around for a while. There are many reasons why the interface will evolve. Designers are no longer limited by technology, their biggest limitation today is their own creativity. It is also important that many of these emerging technologies are reasonably priced, or seamlessly integrated in new devices at no extra cost to the user.

The design process in the future will change. For example, in order to make an interface for VR we need specialist skills, and we need to create UIs in 3D. In addition to designing 3D assets, designers will also have to master certain skills, for example learn some Unity basics, or employ 3D design software.

The ability to empathize and understand the motivation of those you work with is crucial. Engineers, PMs, and other designers all come with their own particular needs and goals and if you can demonstrate your sensitivity to them, you’ll be well received.

Engineers: I’ve found that providing especially close attention to interaction design and accounting for edge cases is important. Engineers are responsible for building the product — making sure that your interactions function properly for all use cases will save your engineer friends time and frustration. Also, try to speak their language — learn how to code. Being confident in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is a great start.

PMs: I emphasize communication, storytelling, and tradeoffs. PMs manage deadlines, appeal to admins and keep projects running smoothly. Make sure you and your PM are sync’d. Being able to tell a powerful story about your design will also help to make their job easier when trying to persuade other stakeholders.

Designers: Show, don’t tell. Focus your attention toward the design problem instead of individual design preferences. Working with other designers is an incredible opportunity for collaboration and can push you to better work. When working with other designers, sometimes I like to practice pair design — it’s a great way to develop shared ownership over the work and push your individual design limits.

Before any product features can be decided, you will need to develop a clear picture of what the business goals and user needs for the product are. Explain to the interviewer how a MVP (minimum viable product) could be developed. You can quickly test your hypothesis through user research which will answer these questions:

☛ Who is the user?
☛ Why does the user care if the product exists?
☛ What are the user’s goals?
Explain how user research helps to avoid the common pitfall of designing for personal preferences. It is most often the case that the user is not you. Once enough data has been collected from the experiments and the user’s goals have been validated, then you can begin to determine how they can be aligned with the goals of the business and therefore how the product features will be prioritized.

Animation has long been used as an eye-catching element that helps differentiate an app from its competitors.

Now, however, more designers are incorporating animation as a functional element that enhances the user experience, to simulate the appearance of interacting with a real object.

Animation is no longer just for games. It also illuminates navigation: Think of a button that toggles a panel of otherwise hidden content, such as a menu. Closing the panel shrinks the menu, where it disappears back into the button. Other examples include zooming content or providing feedback to confirm a user’s action.

Functional animation makes app experiences more dynamic and provides a more direct visualization of the user’s actions. As smartphones become more advanced, designers are adding HTML5 animation and parallax design to mobile apps to bring a new level of richness and excitement to the mobile user experience.

This is a great question in any programming language and is really designed to see how you problem solve. You're not given much information, but some interviews will slip you more details of the issue as you go along. Start simple:

☛ get the exact steps to reproduce it.
☛ find out the device, iOS version.
☛ do they have the latest version?
☛ get device logs if possible.

Once you can reproduce it or have more information then start using tooling. Let's say it crashes because of a memory leak, I'd expect to see someone suggest using Instruments leak tool. A really impressive candidate would start talking about writing a unit test that reproduces the issue and debugging through it.

Other variations of this question include slow UI or the application freezing. Again the idea is to see how you problem solve, what tools do you know about that would help and do you know how to use them correctly.

There's no right or wrong answer to this, but it's great way of seeing if you understand the benefits and challenges with each approach. Here's the common answers I hear:

☛ Storyboard's and Xib's are great for quickly producing UI's that match a design spec. They are also really easy for product managers to visually see how far along a screen is.
☛ Storyboard's are also great at representing a flow through an application and allowing a high-level visualization of an entire application.
☛ Storyboard's drawbacks are that in a team environment they are difficult to work on collaboratively because they're a single file and merge's become difficult to manage.
☛ Storyboards and Xib files can also suffer from duplication and become difficult to update. For example if all button's need to look identical and suddenly need a color change, then it can be a long/difficult process to do this across storyboards and xibs.
☛ Programmatically constructing UIView's can be verbose and tedious, but it can allow for greater control and also easier separation and sharing of code. They can also be more easily unit tested.
Most developers will propose a combination of all 3 where it makes sense to share code, then re-usable UIViews or Xib files.

Iconography is a visual language used to represent functionality or content. Icons are used when we don’t have enough space to display textual content. Therefore, icons are meant to be simple visual elements that are recognized and understood immediately.

In practice, we will encounter both version of these icons. They can appear outlined or filled, but the whole icon set needs to be consistent and employ the same stroke. However, this is something that is more related to visual design. When it comes to UX, one thing is sure. If we use the outlined icons for the normal state, then we should probably use the filled icon for the active state of the button. It’s important to indicate which section is currently active by highlighting the icon in a specific way. Although we could change the color of the outline, this approach is not ideal when we are dealing with a light background, so it’s better to use the filled/outline approach. This makes recognition of active tabs and controls more straightforward. Icons at the end are here to serve as navigation to other section of the app.

This is a great opportunity for you to talk about your passion for UX design and what inspires you in your work. Talk about UX blogs, newsletters, industry leaders, or conferences that you attend or follow. Perhaps you’ve been to a hackathon or a meetup that motivated you, or perhaps you read a great article on medium that changed the way you practice UX design.

Some of my own favorite UX blogs are:
☛ UXMastery
☛ Usertesting blog

Some influential leaders in the field who you should check out are:
☛ Joe Natoli
☛ Jared Spool
☛ Susan Weinschenk
☛ David Travis

More great resources:
☛ Blogs to follow by User Testing
☛ 20 UX Designers to follow on Twitter
☛ UX books to read

This is a very common task in iOS and a good answer here can cover a whole host of knowledge. The important piece of information in the question is that the images are hosted remotely and they may take time to download, therefore when it asks for “considerations”, you should be talking about:

☛ Only download the image when the cell is scrolled into view, i.e. when cellForRowAtIndexPath is called.
☛ Downloading the image asynchronously on a background thread so as not to block the UI so the user can keep scrolling.
☛ When the image has downloaded for a cell we need to check if that cell is still in the view or whether it has been re-used by another piece of data. If it’s been re-used then we should discard the image, otherwise we need to switch back to the main thread to change the image on the cell.
Other good answers will go on to talk about offline caching of the images, using placeholder images while the images are being downloaded.

Native or responsive is usually the first question people ask when they find the terminology unfamiliar. What is the difference from a design perspective?

Mobile apps can be developed natively or as hybrid apps, while mobile-friendly websites can be developed as adaptive or responsive. The basic design process behind all of them is more or less the same. The only thing we need to consider when designing for mobile is that we have a specific set of rules we need to follow. Apple has its own, and so does Google.

When you’re designing for iOS or Android, the underlying process is the same. First, we do research that will outline best practices and show us what we can do on a certain platform and what not. Basically, research helps us we learn restrictions and take advantage of possibilities a given field.

Designers are likely to work on both native app and responsive web designs. Native apps are important because we want the user to have them on their dashboard, and this way we want to help users in their everyday activities. Some native apps can work offline while others can’t.

Responsive web design is important for SEO and Google indexing. So, if we want to have your project well-ranked on Google, you definitely go for a mobile-friendly responsive design.