UX/UI Interview Questions with Answers & Tips! (from a Google UX Designer)

okay today we're going to talk about something that I really really really really really hate interviews and I feel like I'm not alone here a lot of us hate interviews and for those of you who like interviews what is wrong with you I'm just kidding we love our extroverted friends here so you're welcome to stay I have tips for you too but for me the idea of going to interviews and especially in Tech where you have tons of interviews that'ss terrible so as an introverted person and I actually have a little bit of social anxiety

too which if you saw my video on social anxiety you would know did you okay does not that many views so I don't know if you did but anyways as someone that has a little bit of social anxiety and is introverted I don't particularly enjoy interviews so coming in as prepared as possible is the only way for me to feel like I can succeed so in today's video I'm going to go over some of the more common and not so common questions that you can expect to get if you you're going for an entry level

or an internship role and maybe for some senior roles they'll ask some of the more common ones but this will be mainly focused on Junior and entry level and like internship roles so this first set of questions is going to be all about helping the interviewer get to know you so the first question that you can expect is something around tell me about yourself I hope you already have your little pitch ready for that but really you you just want to give some information about you like where you're from some fun facts about your background

and idea of what your interests are in a short amount of time you don't want to dwell on this question too much you want to highlight some of the skills that make you a good candidate for the role along with that question you should be ready to talk about how you got into design and I don't know if all of the interviews are going to ask you that but this could be a nice follow up to the tell me about yourself is talk about how you got into the sign what got you interested do you

have any background that could influence you as a UF designer and make you a unique candidate is there anything in your background that ties you to the company like if you're working for a video game company do you have experience with video games are you a gamer can you bring that user experience into the role all of those things that make you unique would be great things to talk about if someone asked you the question of tell me about how you got into design another question that you could be asked is where do you look

for inspiration or this could be also tied into how do you stay up to date with the latest trends you could show that you have diverse interests that are related to design but then you also want to make sure that what you're saying relates to you X especially if you're a junior or an entry level designer because you're most likely going to be working on a lot of tactical projects so you want to make sure that you are able to express that you can find patterns and trends that you can then incorporate Into Your Role

okay another question that you should be ready for and I was asked this question what is your design process and honestly for this I would pick a framework that is popular in terms of the design process something like the Double Diamond and then use that as a way to frame your answer because you want to make sure that you convey that you are familiar with common processes and design processes that then can translate easily to whatever role you're going to be applying to so definitely something like the Double Diamond would be a great way to

show that you understand the process and that you're going to be able to start contributing as soon as possible when you join the role also I want to say that it's getting hard to keep up with the videos in terms of how much the channel is GR in terms of subscribers like we're already past 700 in the last video I was celebrating the fact the we were almost at 600 so thank you all so much to everyone that has subscribed liked on the videos and supported me but right now the channel is really small so

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faster so now we're getting into the project questions this section can take many different forms it could be you walking through your portfolio it could be the interviewer read your portfolio and it's asking you questions based on a project that they looked at but this is all about questions specific to a portfolio and you should be ready to give a summary of that project talk about what you learned talk about what is the project about what was the design problem that you were tackling if it was a group project what did you do what were

your specific responsibilities and then once you give an overview of that project you should get ready to talk about what you would have done differently you know how we talked in the case study if you haven't seen the case study video check it out up here but you should get ready to talk about your reflection so in the case study we had a section about takeaways like what you learned so whenever you're going over your project and you've already summarized it you should get ready to answer questions about what you would have done differently what

did you learn this is going to be something that potentially the interviewer will want to asked just to get a sense of how you would handle projects what you would learn from them how you would grow in the position another form that this question could take is what were the biggest challenges that you faced in the project and how did you tackle them so you want to be honest with this question but not just provide what the challenge is but then also how you solved it and how you improved the situation this is similar to

like in a more senior role they might ask you how you manage stakeholders or you manage stakeholder expectations how do you deal with difficult situations to resolve the problems like you always want to present that situation but also come up with how you solved it you're going to be working with a lot of different people and there will inevitably be disagreeing opinions and conflict and you might be called upon to use design as a tool to bring everyone together so definitely think about Solutions and ways that you handle tough challenges during that project also if

you anticipate these questions you can set yourself up for Success because you can then choose a project in your portfolio that can serve as a good story for a lot of these questions and give you the information and the experiences needed for for you to look your best during the interview another behavioral question that could come up is a question around describing a situation where your designs were not accepted or someone disagreed with your design choices so definitely in this question you want to be able to Showcase emotional intelligence you want to be able to

Showcase that you can resolve conflicts you want to be able to show that you are someone that's easy to work with you can advocate for the user but then at the same time you're able to come to an agreement and to a compromise with the team so that you basically help the team move forward and then also you can expect some questions about user research in a lot of places user research is not given the value that it deserves and some companies don't even have researchers so you could be asked about how you incorporate Research

into your work and what part of the process do you incorporate research how do you use it how do you leverage research to validate Your Design Solutions so these you can expect some sort of question around research and how do you incorporate into your work and then along those lines you might be asked about high use data to inform your designs so this is something that is a little bit harder if you haven't worked on real projects but in a lot of projects after the design phase and after your designs are approved and you move

into the experimentation phase you will start to get data from those learning experiments and then you can use that data to improve your design especially if you're doing AV testing or you're comparing different options if you've had experience with these types of projects or you've experienced working in this part of the development process then you want to highlight that but if not then you can focus on user research and talk about qualitative and quantitative data from user research that you've performed in your project another way to incorporate user research is talk about how a user

research impacted or changed a design decision or a design approach that you had for one of your projects so potentially you originally had a particular idea of what you thought the design solution was for a particular pain for for a particular problem but then after performing user research you realize that you were solving for the wrong problem or that the solution that you had was not the appropriate one for the problem that you were trying to tackle and you can talk about how you change your designs or your design Direction based on the data that

you gather that would be a great way to show that you have an understanding of how to incorporate all of these different aspects into your own work another one would be being asked about ambiguity so how would you potentially work in a project where there are no requirements where you're not clear what you're trying to solve for they basically want to assess how you work on defining the problem working with your researchers and your cross functional Partners to really understand what it is that you're trying to solve for how do you actually turn it into

a tactical project that then you can put into a road map and start working towards that end goal this is all about working in a space where you're not really sure what the solution is and you're not really clear about which problem you should t tackle so definitely a more advanced question that could be asked I think as long as you have an understanding around the type of questions that you can get asked then you can prepare yourself to have a narrative and have some anecdotes ready for when those questions are asked but in reality

it's really hard to predict what all the questions are going to be asked during an interview because a lot of interviews are very organic so depending on what you answer to a particular question the interviewer could ask you something something different and there could be a follow-up question that you didn't even prepare for so just remember that interviews are organic but you want to make sure that you have the more common questions ironed out so that you don't have to stress during the interview about being blindsided with a question that you were not prepared for

and honestly it might still happen because you don't really know what they're going to ask you in the end so now that we've covered the main questions I want to give you some general tips for the interviews so the first tip is try to not Ramble On You don't want to go into to too much detail you want to make sure that you are as cohesive with your answers as possible at the same time you want to make sure that you use real life examples when it's pertinent something that we use at Google for different

things is called star so it stands for situation task action and result and what that means is basically you're using that framework to structure your answers in a way that's almost like a story right so one example for a situation is people are not clicking on the install button in The Details page for the App Store so the task that was given let's say that for me my task was to figure out how to improve the UI of the detail spage in the App Store to improve the conversion rate for the install button and then

the action is basically you explaining the process that you took how did you solve the problem who did you work with and then finally you want to explain what was the result so what was the outcome of all the work that you did did you improve the conversion rate did you impr improve the click-through rate did you learn something specifically was the project launch this is a great way for you to basically frame the story in your head and then being able to convey it to the interviewer in a way that is both actionable but

also memorable and easy to understand another tip that I wanted to share is to I don't want to say like try to be confident in the interview because the reality is that most us get nervous right I mean you don't want to show up and being all scared and not being able to answer questions but just try to be yourself be honest and if this is a company that you're really excited about build that connection with the person that's interviewing you ask questions you should think about this interview as not just them interviewing you but

you also interviewing the company you want to make sure that you ask them about the culture of the company you want to make sure that you ask them about what's their design process what are the resources for designer how mature is the design Department in the company you want to leave with an understanding that this company would be a good fit for you and the only way to do that is by asking the interviewer questions as well and another tip is to practice active listening listen to the interviewer when they're talking to you so you

can respond to them with the most relevant answer possible and show them that you can listen and that you can pay attention and actually the idea of active listening is that you also get out of your head and you can focus on the interviewer instead of focusing on yourself and if you're feeling nervous so that's one strategy to also make yourself feel more at ease is to really focus on the person interviewing you and not so much on yourself also another tip is to feel free to take time to think I know that in the

moment we want to respond as fast as possible but something that is completely acceptable is to let the interviewer know to give you a second to pull your thoughts together and really think about the question and come up with the best answer that is totally fine you don't have to blurt out something you can take a pause let the interviewer know and take some time to think about what you want to say another tip is to go into the interview having research the company you want to make sure that they that you know the company

because you will definitely be asked why you want to work here and that's definitely going to be a question you want to make sure that you somehow align your own values and your interest with the values and the goals of the company and that's something that you can bring up when they ask you why do you want to work here so I just gave you all of these examples for the interview questions tips on how to manage yourself and the interview and also a framework for how to structure your answers so I think you're ready

to go ahead and apply for your internship or your roles so go ahead and check out my video on how to apply for a ux internship or my playlist on how to prepare yourself for an entry level role in ux design I'll see you in the next video bye