Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Taking and Implementing Feedback
Responding positively to interviewer suggestions, implementing changes gracefully, and building on feedback rather than getting defensive. Asking clarifying questions about feedback.
Pragmatism & Shipping Quality Solutions Within Constraints
Understanding real-world constraints (time, resources, technical limitations, budget, team capacity) and prioritizing effectively. Shipping good-enough solutions on time and in scope rather than endlessly iterating toward perfection. Balancing design quality and user experience with business needs and timelines.
Component Architecture and Code Organization
Focuses on structuring code and components for maintainability, extensibility, and testability. Topics include separation of concerns between structure presentation and logic, component design and reuse patterns, module and file organization, dependency management, state management strategies for complex state, framework specific best practices when applicable, testing strategy and testability, performance and rendering considerations, and evolving designs at senior or staff levels to balance flexibility with simplicity. Candidates should be able to discuss concrete code organization approaches and architectural trade offs for component based systems.
User Personas and Journey Mapping
Covers the end to end practice of creating research grounded user personas and journey maps that synthesize qualitative and quantitative data into actionable artifacts that guide product and design decisions. Candidates should demonstrate research methods and synthesis techniques such as interviews, surveys, analytics analysis, contextual inquiry, affinity mapping, and empathy mapping, and show how to triangulate evidence to define user segments and persona attributes including goals, motivations, behaviors, pain points, constraints, context of use, and validation evidence. The topic includes structuring personas so they are usable by product and design teams while avoiding stereotyping, documenting use cases, and linking personas to success metrics and validation approaches. For journey mapping, candidates should be able to map flows and scenarios across timelines or stages, identify touchpoints, channels, emotional states, key moments of truth, pain points, opportunities, and barriers to conversion or product use, and link journey artifacts to service blueprints and operational considerations. Also assessed are practices for prioritizing opportunities, iterating and validating artifacts with users, running cross functional workshops, communicating findings to stakeholders, tooling and deliverable formats, storytelling and visualization choices, using artifacts to inform requirements testing and metrics, and examples of how personas and journey maps changed product direction.
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.
Learning from Feedback and Iteration
Evaluate how the candidate solicits, interprets, and incorporates feedback from users, teammates, and stakeholders to improve a product, design, or process. Areas include examples of iterative cycles driven by user testing or stakeholder input, specific pivots informed by feedback, changes to documentation or deliverables based on review, techniques for gathering and prioritizing feedback, and evidence of continuous improvement and valuing diverse perspectives.
Technical Depth & Areas of Specialization
At FAANG companies, designers often have areas of depth or expertise. Discuss yours: e.g., mobile design, design systems, user research, accessibility, interaction design, etc. Show you have informed opinions based on experience and continuous learning.
Usability Testing and Validation
Comprehensive skills for planning, conducting, analyzing, and applying findings from usability studies to improve product ease of use and user satisfaction. Topics include defining clear research goals and success criteria, recruiting representative participants, writing neutral tasks and scenarios, and selecting appropriate methods and fidelity levels. Candidates should be able to choose and justify moderated versus unmoderated sessions, remote versus in person methods, and lab versus field testing, and to decide when to use low fidelity prototypes, high fidelity prototypes, or production interfaces. Coverage includes moderation and facilitation techniques, observational best practices such as think aloud protocols, strategies to reduce bias and demand effects, accessibility and cross device testing, and capturing both qualitative and quantitative data including task success, time on task, error rates, behavioral observations, and satisfaction measures. The topic also covers approaches to analyze and synthesize findings, triangulate qualitative insights with metrics, prioritize usability issues into actionable recommendations, create testable hypotheses, communicate results to stakeholders, plan iterative validation cycles, and integrate usability testing with other validation methods such as heuristic evaluation, analytics review, and split testing. Practical considerations such as sample size trade offs, session logistics, recording and consent, and tools for remote and unmoderated studies are also included.
Thinking Out Loud and Process Transparency
Verbalizing your design thinking, explaining why you're making choices, and walking the interviewer through your approach rather than just showing final work.