Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Audience Analysis and Documentation Design
Focuses on identifying and analyzing distinct documentation audiences and designing content to meet their needs. Includes audience segmentation and persona development, mapping user roles such as developers operators end users and managers to their information needs, tailoring tone level of technical detail and content formats, organizing documentation around user tasks and journeys instead of product internal structure, and using research inputs such as interviews surveys analytics and support tickets to prioritize and craft content. Assessment can include concrete examples of adapting installation guides API references tutorials and troubleshooting content for different audiences.
Technical Explanation and Scoping
Skills and techniques for taking complex technical subject matter and making it understandable and appropriately scoped for a given audience. This includes clarifying the audience needs and the precise question to answer, narrowing broad topics into a manageable scope, identifying core concepts and dependencies, and deciding the right level of detail. Candidates should demonstrate structured approaches such as a clarify explain conclude framework, progressive disclosure, use of analogies and concrete examples, and when to link to or defer to deeper resources. Good answers show awareness of cognitive load, documentation structure, content architecture, and ways to tailor explanations for different technical and non technical stakeholders.
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.
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.
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.