Whether you are an UI/UX designer from Madurai or outside of Madurai or anywhere from India if you need to get a job as an UI/UX designer then you need to go through several steps of interview process. The initial steps of interview process will involve some level of technical questions to understand your depth of knowledge in UI/UX design field. Generally these preliminary rounds of interview are handled by the HR itself who barely has knowledge about UI/UX design and would google for UI/UX design questions before your interview. But, after clearing those preliminary rounds when you get to have a core technical round with the design team lead or a senior UI/UX designer who works in the company thats where things start getting hard and UI/UX design student's find it difficult to go through. So in this article we are going to cover those interview questions, both the preliminary questions and the technical ones so that UI/UX design aspirants can easily prepare for your Ui/UX design job interviews. Before that we would like to give you a sneek peak into about the UI/UX designer job, roles and responsibilites and what a company expects from a UI/UX designer candidate.
Who are UI/UX Designers?
UI/UX designers are professionals who design websites and app in a manner such that it is well optimized for user intent. When an ui/ux designer designs a website they will make sure that the reason a person visits the website is satisfied as soon as they enter the website such that the information they are seeking is presented right in front of their eyes without navigating, searching or wandering around the website searching for the information they wanted. Similarly when an ui/ux designer designs an app they will keep in mind the motive with which an user downloads the app, their expectations and makes sure thet accomplish the task as soon as possible. UI/UX designers achieve this by doing various cycles of research, designing, testing and iterations. They work closely with developers, product owners and seo team to bring out a digital product that satisfies all of its users.
Roles and responsibilities of an UI/UX designer
- Meeting the client/product owner and getting to know about the product the product owner wants to create.
- Understanding the motivation why the product owner wants to build the product.
- Getting to know about other stakeholders involved in this product.
- Meeting other stakeholders of the products and understanding their expectations and frustrations.
- Understanding user sentiments by doing field research who is going to be the end user of the product.
- Exploring competitor products and the value they add to the end users.
- Coming up with new ideas and features that would benefit end users better than competitor products.
- Exploring various other unaddressed problems the end user faces.
- Creating solutions for those unaddressed problems in the existing product.
- Predicting worst case scenarios and taking counter measures even before they occur.
- Making sure the product loads and responds faster and creates well optimized assets to achieve that.
- Creating design systems, UI elements and components to carry the brand identity as well enabling future scalability.
Company expectations from an UI/UX designer
- Observing skill to understand the BDA and project brief provided by the client.
- Strong understanding user psychology, user behavior and user motive.
- Creative talent to come up with out of the box solutions that match todays fast transforming tech landscape and AI-era.
- Proactive thinking about future features and probable problems that might occur.
- Technical skills like Figma, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop
- Usage of AI tools to automate repetitive tasks such as user persona collection and sorting and reviewing user feedback.
- Implementation of laws of UX, Gestalt principles, VIMM modal, Maslow's Hierarchy for creating the best user experience for end users.
- Correct usage of color theory, typography, fundamentals of UI/UX design and principles of UI/UX design
- Prototyping, interaction design and developer and product owner handoffs.
- Agility to be able to make changes even after the product has entered the development phase.
- Versatality and adaptability to make UI/UX designers employable in any type of project and in any type of domain for all types of digital platforms.
UI/UX designer interview questions
The following questions have been curated after getting feedbacks from 500+ of our students who have attended interviews and have gone through them and are working as UI/UX designers in various prestigious organizations and their interviews. We have categorized them as Preliminary Questions and Technical Questions and also the best possible answers for that. All the best!
Preliminary interview questions
Q. What is UI/UX design?
A. UI/UX design is the process where an user centric digital product such as a website or a mobile app is designed keeping in mind about the user's goals, intent and motive as well as making sure that they are able to accomplish their task with the least amount of cognitive load, mental load, memory load and motor load. This is a step before the developer codes the website or app and pushes it to production.
Q. How important is UI/UX design?
A. UI/UX design is a very crucial step in creating a digital product. How an architect would design the layout of a building before civil engineer implements and constructs it, similarly an UI/UX designer should create the layout, colors, typography, UI elements, interactive components, interactions, graphic assets, features and navigation of the app or website and the prototype of the app or website for better and easier understanding of how the app or website works for smooth production workflow.
Q. Which is more important UI design or UX design?
A. UI design and UX design both are equally important. A good UI design will help user acquisition and a good UX design will help user retention. So both UI and UX design should work hand in had with each other and should compliment each other.
Q. Why did you choose UI/UX design field?
A. When i first heard about UI/UX design i came to realize that this field is about solving real world problems, collaborating with various stakeholders and teams and putting in both logical thinking and creative thinking together to come up with a most viable solution. The day to day learning and exposure towards multiple domains through various challenges, understanding human psychology, user behavior and user sentiments and creating a digital product putting all this knowledge together is something that made me choose this field.
Quick Tip: Do not answer anything like i am very creative person, i want to showoff my creativity, i like designing or i am very passionate about designing. Tell something like the above which tells that you are already aware of the challenges in this field and you are ready to face them.
Q. As an UI/UX designer what are your expectations in this job?
A. As an UI/UX designer i am looking forward to collaborate and cowork with varios teams such as development team, SEO team, graphic design team and grow as a wholesome professional who in future would be able to apply and implement my knowledge gained from these teams in my future projects. Also i want to work in various domains and not get stereotyped in same types of projects.
Q. What types of projects you are interested in?
A. I am interested in projects that involve the latest technologies such as IoT, machine learning, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, AR/VR, gesture based and voice based UI/UX projects and also in projects that go beyond web, mobile and watch interfaces. I would also like to work in various domains that need digital transformation such as banking, finance, insurance, education, production, retail, logistics and many more.
Q. How much do you rate yourself as an UI/UX designer?
A. I would rate myself as 9/10 because there is always scope for improvement how much ever experienced we may become.
Q. Where do you find your design inspiration?
A. Design inspiration is around us everywhere, from a bus stop billboard to pinterest or dribbble or behance it is spread all over. All we need is a keen eye and an observant mind to see it.
Q. How do you handle pressure?
A. If we are going to be consistent and putting effort from day 1 then there will be no pressure towards the end of the project or if we keep procrastinating then we will always feel pressure. Moreover i understand that clients might come up in the last minute asking for some changes and i will be able to handle that type of pressure calm and cool without panicking because i will be always expecting that because these types of situations are the ones that is going to mold me into a better preofessional.
Q. How do you prepare yourself for a new UI/UX project?
A. Though i would be actually excited for a new UI/UX project, i wouldn't get too carried away by the excitement but would be looking forward to what i would learn from this project and how am i going to add value to the project, client and our company making it a win-win-win situation overall. So from the inception meeting of the project i would keep a dedicated section in my diary nting down even the simplest of information and even the smallest of doubts because things that we might think as silly or ignorable might tuen out to be a problem or a feature in future.
Technical interview questions
Q. Explain your UX design process
A. After going through the project brief i would do competitor analysis, then i would collect stakeholder expectations, followed by building user personas from various demographics of users, sort and segregate the goals and frustrations from the user responses and build a information architecture based upon user priorities, followed by creating a task flow, user journey mapping and then convert it into a userflow. Then perform verious UX tests and heuristic evaluations to minimize errors as much as possible before moving on to wireframes and UI design.
Q. What is heuristic evaluation in UI/UX design?
A. A heuristic evaluation in UI/UX design means going through a checklist of UX design principles and if they are implemented in the website or app and also going through it for any scope of improvement and removal of any unnecessary redundancies or features or steps in the userflow.
Q. What types of fonts would you use in an UI/UX design project?
A. Though there may be plenty of typefaces available on the internet yet i would stick on to mostly serif/sans-serif fonts such as Lato, Poppins, Montserrat, Inter, Outfit, Oxygen, Merriweather, Lora, Playfair display, Abril fatface because these fonts are geometric, easy on eyes and most importantly they are visible, readable and legible on digital devices.
Q. What are the design trends you follow?
A. We cannot blindly follow a design style just because it is trending. We need to choose a design style that justifies the project. We cannot design a university website with dazzling colors because it will make it look playful rather disciplined. But still currently abstract gradient blobs, center aligned hero sections and bento grids are trending.
Quick Tip: Use lots of UX terminologies whenever you answer instead of generic words such as use wireframes instead of outlines, use demographics instead of user groups.
Q. What type of colors you use for your UI/UX design projects?
A. It totally depends upon the type of project. I would mostly like to stick on to the brand guidelines. If they do not have one such then rather than choosing colors i would prefer color schemes. For an carnival website i would choose a tetradic color scheme, for a hospital or bank or education website i would choose cool colors, for a restaurant website i would choose warm colors, for marriage website i would choose autumn colors, because that gives us a larger playgound to explore with various colors.
Q. What the typography fundamentals you mostly use in your UI/UX design projects
A. I would prefer to stick in to not more than two fonts, mostly serif/sans-serif combinations, use a line spacing of 1.2x to 1.5x the font size, choose a font family that has more weights, will not use high contrast black text on white background instead 60% to 80% grey on white backgrounds, use consistent highlighting for texts, will not go beyond 12 lines per para and other commandments of tpyography i would use.
Q. Tell me some of the UX principles you follow
A. Fitts law, Hicks law, Doherty's Threshold, Jakob's law, Miller's law, Occam's Razor, Pareto Principle, Parkinson's law, peak end rule, serial position effect, Tesler's law, Postel's law are some of the UX principles that i would implement most often in my UI/UX design projects.
Q. Which Gestalt principles you would use in your UI/UX projects?
A. Similarity, Pragnanz, Proximity, Common Region, Uniform Connectness, Closure and Continuity are the Gestalt principles that i would apply in my UI/UX design projects
Q. What is interaction design?
A. Interaction design means how a system will respond back to an user when they interact with it like when a process is happening on the backend and instead of not showing anything on the screen playing a processing animation while displaying various stages of that process and updating as each stage gets complete so that the user is not oblivious to what is happening on the backend is called interaction design.
Q. What is prototyping?
A. Once the UI screens are designed i cannot just give the client or developer to develop or the end user the static screens to use, they will not be able to develop it or use it. So i need to create links between the UI screens such that when i interact (like click, swipe or drag) on any the UI elements in a screen it leads to the respective screen to which it should go. This makes it easier for the client to understand how the final product would look like as well makes the developer to develop the screens in correct sequence.
Q. What is progressive disclosure?
A. Instead of displaying a long form of sign up it is better to split them into a multi-step sign up process where each step is displayed in a separate screen. This would stop the user from initial fatigue caused by seeing the long sign up form and would encourage them fill it up. This is called as progressive disclosure.
Q. What do you do to break monotony in designs?
A. A symmetrical design will definitely cause monotony to users so i would go ahead with asymmetrical designs. Also would make sure that two consecutive sections do not have the same layout.
Q. Won't a multi-step form create fatigue for an user?
A. Though it will cause but significantly lesser than a longer form. Yet we can still reduce the fatigue by using different interactions, including flow state from laws of UX and a bit of gamification we can definitely break the monotony. Like having an open calendar instead of a text field would break the monotony. Also if we display 1/5 steps kind of thing at the start of the multi-step form and update it as they complete each step they would complete the form more enthusiastically as they are approaching closer to the completion of the form.
Q. How will you increase the clickability of a website or an app?
A. Instead of making the sign up process a task i will make it into an achivement. For example instead of displaying Sign up on a finance website i would write start earning which would attract more clicks than usual.
Q. How would you implement gamification in your designs?
A. For example instead of using a normal slider for a volume button i would use a circular knob which user can click and drag and rotate to control the volume. This is how we can implement gamification in UI/UX designs.
Q. Do you think UI/UX design is still needed in this AI era?
A. Definitely yes, because AI takes decisions based upon facts, numbers and logic and not based upon human emotions and user sentiments which is the most important factor in user centered designs. For example an accident happens and a 48 year old man who has 55% chances of survival and a 6 year old girl who has 28% chances are there an AI robot would choose to save the 48 year old man because he has more chances of surviving, but a human would save the 6 year old girl because she is yet to enjoy her life. This humanization factor is what AI will lack so UI/UX designers are a must even in this AI era.
Q. Do you use AI tools for UI/UX designing?
A. Yes i do use AI tools for UI/UX designing but not for thinking, but to automate certain repetitive tasks such as segregating and sorting user personas so that not only it finishes it faster than me but also i would use that time to come up with a better solution.
Q. What AI tools you use for UI/UX designing?
A. Mostly gemini or chatgpt for segregating and sorting user personas, Miro for userflows, Figma make, Google AI studio, Replit, lovable, bolt, V0 for prototyping and micro-interactions.
Q. What is auto layout in Figma?
A. Auto layout in Figma is grouping various UI elements into frames such that it enables to designer to change it different screen dimensions without much effort.
Q. What are components and variables in Figma?
A. A reusable UI element which a designer can just pull it from the library whenever required and make minimum changes when needed are called as components. They are basically user defined readymade or library objects. Variables can store repetitive values, color codes, opacities, text styles so that the user can choose from them instead of typing or searching it everytime. This makes the design process faster and also creates a design system which enables development faster and future scalability easier.
Q. What is the difference between a scalable project and a modular project?
A. If a project needs to be scalable then it needs to be modular. A module based project makes scaling easier and expansion smooth.
