Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
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.
Findings Presentation and Impact
Ability to clearly present analytical findings and insights to stakeholders, and explain how those findings shaped a decision, process, or outcome. Covers structuring a findings narrative (context, evidence, recommendation), choosing the right visualization or format for the data, tailoring depth and language for technical versus non-technical audiences, and demonstrating measurable impact and follow-through on recommendations.
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.
Responsive and CSS Design
Focuses on building adaptable, maintainable user interfaces across devices and screen sizes using CSS and responsive design principles. Topics include mobile first and adaptive strategies, media queries, fluid and relative units, responsive images and picture sources, layout techniques using Flexbox and CSS Grid, responsive typography and spacing, component breakpoints and adaptive components, writing efficient and maintainable styles with methodologies like BEM or CSS in JS, CSS custom properties for theming, handling interactive states and accessible focus styles, performance considerations for layout and animations, and how responsive work intersects with accessibility (touch targets, readable text, focus management). Candidates should be ready to explain implementation details, trade offs, and examples of responsive patterns they used.
Responsive Design and Device Strategy
Covers designing user interfaces and front end architectures that adapt gracefully across a wide range of screen sizes and device types. Topics include breakpoint strategy, fluid and adaptive layout patterns, component adaptation rules, progressive enhancement, handling single column to multi column transitions, touch and pointer interactions, performance implications for mobile versus tablet and desktop, and accessibility considerations. At senior levels include how to scale responsive approaches across teams and products: design systems and component libraries that enforce responsive behavior, guidelines for consistency, testing strategies across form factors, build and release coordination, and measuring success through metrics such as perceived performance and device specific engagement.
Usability Principles and Heuristics
Covers core usability principles and established heuristics used to evaluate and design user interfaces. Candidates should understand Nielsen style heuristics such as visibility of system status, match between system and the real world, user control and freedom, consistency and standards, error prevention and recovery, recognition rather than recall, flexibility and efficiency of use, aesthetic and minimalist design, help and documentation, and user freedom. Beyond listing heuristics, be prepared to explain how principles like feedback, affordance, discoverability, error prevention, progressive disclosure, accessibility, and reduction of cognitive load influence interaction design decisions. Expect to discuss methods for applying heuristics in practice, for example conducting heuristic evaluations, creating checklists, running usability tests, analyzing metrics such as task success rate, time on task, error rate, and System Usability Scale scores, and iterating designs based on findings. Interviewers may ask for concrete examples of trade offs you made, defects you detected with heuristics, how you prioritized fixes, and how you communicated usability issues to engineers and stakeholders.
Interactive States & Micro Interactions
Include interactive states in your designs: hover states, active states, error states, loading states, empty states, disabled states. Explain the purpose of micro-interactions in your design. Show that you think about the complete user experience, including edge cases. Use Figma prototyping or describe interactions clearly.
Accessibility and Usability Principles
Knowledge and application of accessibility and usability principles across the design process, including planning, prototyping, testing, and delivery. Candidates should be able to explain core usability heuristics such as consistency, feedback, simplicity, discoverability, and error prevention and recovery. They should also demonstrate understanding of accessibility standards and best practices including WCAG guidelines, semantic markup and ARIA roles, keyboard navigation and focus management, color contrast and perceptual considerations, readable labels and form accessibility, and compatibility with assistive technologies such as screen readers. Describe how accessibility and usability are integrated early into workflows: design systems and component libraries, accessibility acceptance criteria, automated and manual testing, user testing with diverse participants, and iterative fixes from research findings. For interfaces with real time behavior, discuss additional considerations such as timely feedback, state synchronization, announcement strategies for dynamic updates, performance and latency impacts on accessibility, and graceful degradation for users with limited bandwidth or assistive tools. Expect examples of concrete decisions, tradeoffs, metrics used to measure accessibility and usability, and stories showing how designs were improved through testing and remediation.
Accessibility and Inclusive Design at Scale
Covers designing and owning accessibility as a first class concern across applications and design systems as they grow. Topics include semantic markup, proper use of accessibility roles and ARIA for complex interactions, keyboard navigation and focus management, screen reader compatibility, alt text and meaningful content semantics, color contrast and visual accessibility, localization and right to left support, theming and dark mode impacts, performance implications of accessibility features, and how to bake compliance to WCAG and accessibility testing into architecture and release processes. Also includes governance and culture topics such as creating component level accessibility guidelines, accessibility automation and testing strategies, advocacy and cross team processes to keep accessibility maintained at scale, and considerations for maintaining accessibility across devices, form factors, and varying browser support and graceful degradation.