Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
User Understanding and Empathy
Focuses on the ability to deeply understand users, build empathy across teams, and ensure user needs drive product decisions. Topics include user research methods such as interviews, surveys, observation, usability testing, and analysis; creation and use of artifacts like personas, user journey maps, empathy maps, and problem framing; synthesizing insights into actionable requirements; and communicating user needs compellingly to influence stakeholders. Candidates should provide examples of how they brought users into design conversations, prioritized user pain points, and measured impact on user experience. Senior candidates should show how they fostered a user centered culture and scaled research and empathy practices across teams.
User Research Strategy and Application
Focuses on turning user and customer insights into strategic product and content decisions and on scaling research practices across teams. Candidates should demonstrate how to synthesize feedback into actionable artifacts such as personas, journey maps, problem statements, prioritized insight backlogs, and success metrics; integrate findings into product roadmaps and backlog prioritization; balance ad hoc feature requests with long term product vision; design experiments and metrics to validate hypotheses and measure impact; communicate insights to and influence cross functional stakeholders; create research roadmaps, prioritize research investments, and scale reproducible research practices and governance; conduct audience analysis to tailor content, terminology, structure, examples, and level of detail for different reader types; and document how research outcomes changed product or documentation decisions. At senior levels include driving adoption of research driven workflows, demonstrating measurable research impact, and embedding research into cross functional development cycles.
Design Collaboration and User-Centered Thinking
Covers working effectively with design partners and cross functional teams to apply user centered design principles. Candidates should be able to describe design thinking processes, how they incorporate user research and usability testing into product decisions, and examples of resolving trade offs between feasibility, user preference, and business goals. This topic also includes communication patterns with designers and product managers, running and participating in design critiques, handoff and iteration workflows, prioritizing research insights, and balancing qualitative and quantitative evidence to inform design choices.
End to End Design Process
Covers owning and executing a complete design effort from an initial brief through launch and iteration. Candidates should demonstrate problem definition from ambiguous requirements, scoping, and prioritization; planning and conducting or synthesizing user research; identifying user pain points, needs, personas, and journeys; generating multiple solution directions and ideation methods; creating wireframes, user flows, and information architecture; building prototypes at appropriate fidelity; running usability testing or other feedback sessions and synthesizing findings; iterating on designs based on evidence; collaborating with product management and engineering on implementation details and tradeoffs; preparing handoff documentation and design specifications; considering accessibility, performance, and maintainability; and defining success metrics and measuring post launch outcomes. Emphasize how each phase informs the next and how decisions were justified given constraints, stakeholders, and technical considerations.