cybernetics / designer-interview

Some notes on how to interview a UX / Interface Designer.

How to interview a UI/UX Designer

Version: Thursday August 23rd, 2012

If you're like me, at some point in time you'll need to interview a designer for a position at your company. Designers come in all sorts of flavours - visual, interface, mobile, graphic, or print designers (and also frontend engineers who have a design background.) Knowing what to ask in the interview is pretty difficult, and coming up with great design exercises can be challenging.

Here are a few tips I've put together that might help. This document contains many questions, and if your interview is only 45 minutes, you won't be able to get through everything. Pick and choose what questions you think are suitable for the candidate and their role at your company.

Know what you're looking for

If you don’t know what you are looking for, you will never know when you’ve found it. Make sure that you (and your team) have talked about exactly what your project/company needs in a designer, what their duties will be, where you're struggling and where they can help. This will help you target the discussion to get the most out of the interview and make the hiring decision easier.

I quite like what Justin Cooke says about what makes a great UI/UX Designer:

"Someone who can make the complex simple, beautiful and ever so slightly fun."

Preparation

It's impossible to run through a high-fidelity visual design exercise during the interview, so you should familiarize yourself with their aesthetics beforehand. Have a look at their portfolio and choose an interesting project (we'll use this later).

• Do you like their visual design?
• Is it modern, and relevant for the subject matter?
• Will their design style fit well with your company/project?
• Does it follow basic design principles (symmetry, use of whitespace, affordance, etc)
• Does it have good information heirachy?
• Is the copywriting clear and concise?

A bit of background

Firstly introduce yourself, tell them your role at the company, and then ask them to tell you about their background - this will ease in the interview before we get to the hard questions.

• Where did you learn design? Why did you choose design?
• Do you consider yourself a designer or programmer?
• What type of design do you find most challenging?
• What skill would you like to improve the most?
• If it weren't for design or development, what would you be doing otherwise?
• Ask them to describe a project that went wrong. Why did it go wrong, and what did you learn from it?

Process

Remember we chose an interesting project from their portfolio? Make sure you're familiar with it, and then ask them some open ended questions to understand how they approached this project.

• What parts of this project are your work?
• What problem were you given to solve?
• How did you approach solving it?
• How many concepts did you try?
• Who do you bounce ideas off?

The design exercise

Lastly, have an exercise prepared to run through together. This will let you see how they approach the very early planning stage of new projects.

By now you should have a fairly decent idea of what his/her weakness could be - so choose an exercise that capitilizes on that. For example, if their portfolio consists of mainly visual design for static web pages, ask them to design an interface for a mobile app.

During the exercise look for the following things as a sign of a good designer:

• Do they ask a lot of questions early on to remove assumptions?
• Do they write down a list of features or goals for the exercise?
• Do they have a good understanding of the technical implications of what they're designing?
• Is there a clear understanding of basic design principles?
• Is there a clear understanding of design paradigms for the platform chosen?
• Do they suggest more ideas and features outside the scope of the exercise?
• Can you have a comfortable discussion about the greater goals of the application?
• Do they mention weaknesses in the solution they've come up with?

Example exercises

Here are a couple of example exercises I've come up with that might help:

1. A challenging user sign up flow (interaction design)

We're building a furniture recommendation web app where we need to know the users favourite colour. During the sign up flow, how can we help the user find their favourite colour? What other information might we require for this web application, and how would we go about obtaining it from the user?

Good things to look for:

• Users won't automatically know what their favourite colour is. Does the designer try to create a small game or challenge to help narrow down their choice?
• Is the solution short enough to still be part of the sign up flow? Remember there will be extra steps that the user needs to complete before or after this step.
• Does the designer suggest further interesting ideas for the furniture recommendation service? Do they exploit this by including furniture in the colour picking step?

2. A mobile app for cruise ship crews (mobile design)

Ask the designer to sketch out a few screens for a mobile app you're thinking of building. Cruise ships have crews of hundreds and can be away from port for days at a time. Ask the designer to flesh out some wireframes for an application that can:

1. Provide a list of all passengers for the crew member to look up
2. Allow the crew member to mark passengers as special (ie, VIP, or causing trouble)
3. Show some statistics about the ship, such as when it'll dock next, the weight, speed it's traveling, etc.
4. Provide a simple messaging service for crew members (ie, to ask for their shift to be covered)

3. A guitar tuner with only one button (product design with a constraint)

Ask the designer to think about a guitar tuner which only has one button. It needs to be able to:

1. Turn off and on
2. Tune the guitar
3. Change between 5 alternate tuning patterns
4. Be easily viewable from a distance (ie, on stage)

Feel free to swap the guitar tuner for something else (eg, an alarm clock or a TV remote) if the candidate isn't familiar with the functions of a guitar tuner. The basic idea of this exercise is to see how the designer thinks about creative and unique approaches to user interaction with a difficult constraint, and also to get them out of their digital comfort zone with a real life product design.

Further reading

Google Ventures Designer Braden Kowitz talks a bit about how he interviews designers in this article: http://www.designstaff.org/articles/how-to-interview-a-designer-2011-12-29.html

Jason Putorti from Mint has a good Quora answer on interviewing a designer: http://www.quora.com/Jason-Putorti/Posts/How-to-Interview-a-Designer

And of course Smashing Magazine has an article on recruiting a UI/UX Designer: http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/02/16/how-to-recruit-ux-designer/

There's also a very good similar guide for Frontend Engineers: https://github.com/darcyclarke/Front-end-Developer-Interview-Questions