Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Company Product and Design Knowledge
Demonstrate a well researched understanding of the company, its major products, target users, market position, and core business model, combined with familiarity with the company design philosophy and visible product design patterns. Prepare to speak about flagship products and features, typical user demographics and needs, the engineering or product challenges the company faces, and how those constraints shape product and design decisions. For design roles, be ready to articulate what you admire about the company design aesthetic, specific patterns or interactions you observe, accessibility and usability trade offs, and how your own design sensibilities or past work align with and could contribute to that aesthetic. For non design roles, emphasize product priorities, technical or operational challenges, and how your skills would help advance those products. Cite concrete examples such as a recent feature, a product workflow, a known engineering challenge, or public design documentation to show you have done focused research.
Real Time Feedback Iteration
Skills and behaviors for receiving and applying feedback immediately during a live exercise or collaborative session. This includes demonstrating flexibility in approach, exploring alternative directions when new constraints or information appear, iterating prototypes or solutions in small increments, explaining the rationale for changes, prioritizing trade offs under time pressure, and remaining receptive to interviewer or stakeholder hints while preserving clarity about decision criteria. Interview responses should show how the candidate adapts reasoning in real time, tests quick variations, and communicates iteration steps clearly.
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.
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.