Interview questions for user experience design roles
Interview questions
General user experience design knowledge
- What 2 or 3 usability or user experience design books would you recommend to your colleagues?
- How do you keep your knowledge of user experience design and usability up to date?
- How do you decide when a website or application is "usable enough"?
- Can you explain what heuristic evaluation is and what some of its strengths and weaknesses are?
- What are some general guidelines for making web pages accessible to users with visual, hearing, or motor disabilities?
- What courses or workshops have you taken on usability or user interface design?
- Can you give a few examples of cognitive principles that should influence web design?
- What are some of the differences in designing for the web versus designing for print or a Windows or Macintosh GUI application?
- What are some visual design principles that you would try to follow when designing web pages ?
- How do you decide what tasks should be included in a usability test?
- How would you do a competitive analysis of two applications or websites?
- Describe how the user's physical environment can have an impact on the design of a website.
- What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of contextual inquiry/field studies when designing a web site or application?
Experience in a user experience designer role
- What are some of the ethical issues that can come up in a usability or user experience design position? Have you experienced any of these personally? What did you do to resolve/deal with these issues?
- What usability methods are you most experienced with?
- Are you familiar with any information architecture methods? Which ones?
- What usability/UI design methods would you like to know more about?
- What usability/UI design methods are least experienced with?
- Have you run any workshops in usability or user interface design? What topics did you cover?
- Have you ever been involved in documenting the user requirements for a website? What methods did you use to come up with these requirements and what was your involvement in the process?
- Describe how you have marketed user experience design in your current position. How would you market it if you were the first usability or user experience design professional in a company?
- What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a web style guide? If you have worked on a style guide, describe your method for developing it.
- How have you addressed issues of user interface consistency across products in your current position?
- In your current role, how much time do you spend in evaluation versus design?
- What can you do to make usability testing in a lab environment as realistic as possible?
- How much experience do you have recruiting external customers for evaluation or design activities?
- What steps have you taken to convince a reluctant developer to listen to your advice?
- How would you explain the benefits of a user-centred design approach to a project manager who is unfamiliar with it?
Exercises
Design evaluation
Select two websites for candidates to evaluate. The sites could either be within the genre in which the candidate will eventually be working, or they could be two popular or well known sites. Alternatively, you might decide to get the candidates to evaluate some fairly novel designs to see how they handle themselves in unfamiliar design territory. The approach you should take depends on the type of role you are recruiting for.
Give each candidate 30-40 minutes on their own with an Internet-connected computer and ask them to evaluate the sites. Tell them that in the interview they will be asked to:
- Talk through their evaluations and the approach they took
- Identifying good and poor design elements and reasons for this assessment
- Compare and contrast the two websites (optional)
- Putline what they would do to improve the design.
Write the instructions and avoid discussing the exercise with candidates, so they are all are given the same information.
Give candidates advance warning that you will be asking them to do a design evaluation exercise as part of the selection process. Good candidates will come prepared.