Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Design Iteration and Feedback
Covers the end to end practices of gathering, evaluating, synthesizing, and incorporating feedback into iterative design and research cycles. Candidates should demonstrate how they plan and run user research and usability testing, collect feedback from users, teammates, and stakeholders, and use structured synthesis methods such as affinity mapping and thematic analysis to generate actionable insights. Includes practical iteration techniques such as rapid prototyping, playtesting, split testing and controlled experiments, incremental improvements, and versioning of design artifacts. Assesses how candidates prioritize suggested changes using impact and effort considerations, product vision alignment, and technical constraints, and how they define and measure success through quantitative metrics and qualitative signals. Examines interpersonal skills around openness to critique, responding without defensiveness, communicating trade offs and decisions to stakeholders, defending choices with evidence and rationale, documenting learnings, and establishing processes for continuous improvement and knowledge transfer. Also includes learning from past iterations and mistakes and adapting research methodology or recommendations based on new evidence.
Design Process and Design Thinking
Covers user centered design processes and design thinking approaches used to solve product and user experience problems. Candidates should be able to describe discovery and research activities, synthesize insights to identify user needs and constraints, frame problems and hypotheses, and translate research into measurable requirements and success metrics. This topic includes familiarity with research methods such as surveys, interviews, contextual inquiry, and usability testing; mapping techniques such as journey maps and personas; and approaches for incorporating quantitative and qualitative feedback. Interviewers will evaluate knowledge of design frameworks and methodologies, split testing for validation, accessibility and inclusive design, maintaining and scaling design systems, agile design practices, collaboration and hand off to product managers and engineers, stakeholder alignment and management, and measuring business and user impact. Senior level expectations include scaling processes across teams, mentoring and coaching designers, adapting process to constraints, and demonstrating how process choices influenced outcomes and metrics.
Prototyping and Interaction Design
Creating prototypes across fidelities and designing interactive user flows and states to validate and communicate product behavior. This includes building low fidelity wireframes through high fidelity interactive prototypes that demonstrate navigation, transitions, micro interactions, form behavior, error and loading states, and multiple component states. Candidates should show how they choose fidelity for the audience, use prototyping features to simulate real interactions, test flows with users or stakeholders, and iterate based on feedback. This topic also covers how prototypes integrate with design systems, support handoff, and demonstrate thought processes for interaction design decisions and validation strategies.
Design Systems and Component Architecture
Comprehensive coverage of principles and practices for designing, building, and maintaining reusable component libraries and design systems that enable consistent and scalable user interfaces across products and teams. Topics include decomposition of interfaces into components, atomic and modular design principles, component hierarchies and responsibilities, composition versus inheritance and composition patterns, and designing component application programming interfaces, properties and variants. Candidates should be able to discuss naming conventions, file structure and organization, strategies for avoiding tight coupling and property drilling, state and variant management for stateful and stateless components, and approaches to tokenization and theming for consistent styling. Also covered are accessibility and responsive behavior, documentation and developer handoff tooling, testing strategies including unit, integration and visual regression testing, governance and versioning practices, system ownership and release strategies, cross team collaboration between design and engineering, and trade offs between flexibility and constraint when scaling a system or applying system thinking to one off designs or prototypes.
Design Tools and Prototyping
Comprehensive assessment of a candidate's practical proficiency with industry standard visual design and prototyping tools such as Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch. Includes efficient use of core features such as components and variants, auto layout, grids and guides, shared styles for typography and color, asset export, plugins, and libraries. Covers file and layer organization, naming conventions, versioning strategies, and collaboration features that enable cross discipline work and developer handoff, including use of developer view and handoff tools. Evaluates the ability to build reusable systems and components, manage design tokens and variables, produce wireframes, mockups, and interactive prototypes, and make fidelity trade offs between low fidelity sketches and high fidelity mockups. Also assesses accessibility considerations, responsive and cross device layout decisions, prototyping and iteration practices, and efficient techniques such as shortcuts and workflow optimization. Interviewers may request portfolio examples and explanations of tool choices and rationale to demonstrate how specific tools were used to solve product problems and maintain a scalable design system.
Information Architecture and Content Design
Organizing product content and user interfaces for clarity and discoverability. Topics include information hierarchies, navigation and routing, user flows and journey mapping, wireframing and low fidelity exploration, content organization and labeling, progressive disclosure, dashboard layout and KPI placement, filters and drill downs, and ideation and sketching techniques. Evaluates the ability to align structure with user mental models and to iterate designs based on evidence.
Design Decision Rationale & Evidence Based Design
Clearly articulating why you made specific design choices. Connecting design decisions directly back to user research findings and business goals. Explaining trade-offs you considered and why you chose one solution over alternatives. Showing evidence-based thinking rather than opinion-based or taste-based design.
Technical Search Engine Optimization
Comprehensive coverage of technical search engine optimization for web products, including diagnosis, auditing, remediation, and ongoing monitoring of issues that affect crawling, indexing, and organic ranking. Core areas include crawlability and indexation, site architecture and URL structure, internal linking and XML sitemap hygiene, robots.txt and meta robots configuration, canonicalization strategies, redirect management including redirect chains and loops, server response codes and error handling, duplicate content detection and remediation, hreflang and internationalization, and crawl budget considerations. Performance and user experience topics include page speed optimization and Core Web Vitals such as Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift, mobile usability and mobile first indexing, HTTPS implementation and mixed content resolution, structured data markup and schema validation, and techniques such as caching, content delivery networks, image optimization, critical CSS, deferred JavaScript, and server side rendering to improve performance. Candidates should be able to perform full technical audits, use and interpret results from industry tools and platforms, triage and prioritize findings by business impact and implementation effort, produce clear audit reports and remediation plans, translate findings into engineering action items, coordinate fixes with product and engineering teams, verify fixes through testing and monitoring, and establish ongoing site health monitoring and automation.
Technical Depth & Areas of Specialization
Every strong candidate has one or more areas of technical depth that go beyond generalist knowledge. Discuss the area(s) where you have the most depth: how you identify it (a subsystem, technology, domain, or class of problem you gravitate toward), a concrete project or accomplishment that demonstrates that depth, how you actively keep that expertise current (reading, communities, side projects, postmortems), and how that depth changes the way you make trade-offs or collaborate with generalists on your team. Areas of specialization are highly individual and role-dependent (examples span distributed systems reliability, accessibility and design systems, security architecture, data pipelines, performance optimization, mobile platforms) - the interviewer should probe the candidate's own stated specialization rather than assume a fixed domain.