10 UX Designer Interview Questions

Hiring top-notch UX Designers is essential for your company to be competitive in the digital space. When interviewing UX Design candidates, you not only need to know the right questions to ask, but the right responses your candidates should be giving. Below are the top 10 UX designer interview questions to ask your UX candidates and key answers to look for:

1. 1. “Do you consider yourself a purebred UX designer?”
      Try to avoid hybrid candidates that are trying to do both technical and creative work – chances are they’re subpar at both.
   2. “Do you have technical/data-influenced background?”
      They should have either academic or professional experience in something data-heavy. Some may have Masters in behavioral sciences, user testing or heuristics. If you find out your candidate is a recently graduated liberal arts major trying to brand themselves as a “UX Expert”, dig deeper.
   3. “Show me products or solutions you’ve taken the lead on designing.”
      Ask candidates to walk you through their portfolio, to determine if they really were the UX lead or are claiming credit for someone else’s work. Can they point to examples of how their designs were driven by identified user characteristics and desires? And are the designs actually published?
   4. “Explain your process for designing this solution.”
      Look for mentions of User Centered Design, such as conducting stakeholder interviews, user research, usability studies, eye-tracking studies, field studies, focus groups, and data. Prototyping experience and iterative testing using Agile development methodology is also a key indicator of someone that’s the real deal.
   5. “What is your preferred design tool?”
      Most designers have a preferred tool such as Illustrator, Acture, or Vizio. Make sure the candidate is comfortable creating annotations in their chosen tools.
   6. “Walk me through a brief analysis of our home page.”
      This is the litmus test of real UX professionals. They should begin by asking about your users and their goals to determine if your design achieves the desired results. Besides pointing out superficial design flaws (button colors, visual inconsistencies, etc.), a walk-through analysis should identify more strategic issues such as interrupted flows, cognitive loading, mobile application strategy, and limiting factors within the design.
   7. “Explain how you came to that solution.”
      Here you want to determine how articulate the candidate is. As someone that will interact with various stakeholders, a UX Designer should also be able to defend his/her work and advocate for his/her ideas.
   8. “What did your previous team look like?”
      You’re looking for someone that has experience collaborating really well with a team – not someone that has worked as part of an assembly line.
   9. “What is the biggest trend in UX right now?”
      A candidate that is really tuned in to the market will probably point to the pervasive trend of top brands creating strategic consistency across digital properties. Look for someone that’s bought into the idea of brand transparency and a unified experience across channels.
   10. “What do you do in your spare time for fun?”
       People that are really passionate about UX often have pet projects, write blogs, and take the time to network with peer groups. Ask what they do for fun to see if UX is truly engrained in their personality. This will help you pinpoint the real go-getters!