Physical Product Designer

When explaining your design process, you can either describe your potential approach to a typical project (good), or you can explain how you’ve done it in the past on other projects (better). Walk your interviewer through your project(s) by using stories:

☛ Follow a typical story arc: background, opportunity, process, ups and downs along the way, and the final outcome.

☛ Be specific when you talk about the steps that you took from conception to completion of the project.

☛ Acknowledge your design context: Different UX situations require different UX processes. It’s a strength to use your environment to determine the process that works best for a particular situation.

☛ Don’t be afraid if your process isn’t the same as that of other designers. What does matter is your ability to explain the rationale behind your approach.

The ability to empathize and understand the motivation of those you work with is crucial. Engineers, PMs, and other designers all come with their own particular needs and goals and if you can demonstrate your sensitivity to them, you’ll be well received.

☛ Engineers: I’ve found that providing especially close attention to interaction design and accounting for edge cases is important. Engineers are responsible for building the product — making sure that your interactions function properly for all use cases will save your engineer friends time and frustration. Also, try to speak their language — learn how to code. Being confident in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is a great start.

☛ PMs: I emphasize communication, storytelling, and tradeoffs. PMs manage deadlines, appeal to admins and keep projects running smoothly. Make sure you and your PM are sync’d. Being able to tell a powerful story about your design will also help to make their job easier when trying to persuade other stakeholders.

☛ Designers: Show, don’t tell. Focus your attention toward the design problem instead of individual design preferences. Working with other designers is an incredible opportunity for collaboration and can push you to better work. When working with other designers, sometimes I like to practice pair design — it’s a great way to develop shared ownership over the work and push your individual design limits.

☛ Talk to us about your studies; tell us about an aspect of your course that you found the most engaging.

☛ What’s your current occupation/What are you currently working on?

☛ Take us through a couple of your favorite pieces in your portfolio. What was your design process for these pieces? What problems were you trying to solve? How did you make a certain design decision?

☛ To what extent do you “own” the work in your portfolio, and can you be specific about which aspects?

☛ How do you prototype your ideas? How do you know when you’ve got it right?

☛ Tell us how you put yourself in the mind of the user. What kind of research methods do you use when you’re starting a new project.

☛ Tell us about a project that didn’t go as planned and the reasons that led to it. How did you solve the problems that arose?

☛ Do you have a side project you’d like to talk to us about?

☛ What is the best decision tree for Facebook or LinkedIn’s “People You May Know” feature?

☛ Let us assume you are on the Home and Lighting team, how would you go about improving our category page?

☛ Amazon Instant Video wants to come up with a recommendation algorithm. Pretend the product does not already have one.

☛ What would you do to improve the Facebook login?

☛ Instagram currently supports 3 to 15 second videos. We are considering supporting videos of unlimited length. How would you modify the UX to accommodate this?

☛ Slack started an $80 million investment fund for app builders. What app would you build and why?

☛ Redesign the Facebook Newsfeed for Mobile.

☛ How would you improve Dropbox? Which feature is still missing?

☛ How would you monetize Google Maps?

☛ If you were the CEO of LEGO, what new product line would you come up with to increase revenues? Why? Who is the target customer? How do you reach them? How does the product function and what does it look like (UI/UX)? What’s the potential market size?

All designers need a good eye, or the ability to be sensitive to small details. At the same time, a designer should be able to step back and look at a project holistically and evaluate if the problem is being solved, or the message communicated well.

I think its essential that (aspiring) designers learn about and gain an appreciation for typography. You can learn a lot about the essentials of graphic design through the study of typography, like visual hierarchy, contrast, and dealing with white space. It also helps to know about the history of graphic design.

As for software, Photoshop is the quintessential program for making website layouts (it’s great with pixel-grid alignment). I’ve used Illustrator for mocking up layouts as well, but it’s better for vector graphics and logos that need easy scaling. Starting out with these two programs is beneficial… and many of their keyboard shortcuts carry over! I should also mention InDesign as the key choice for printed layouts and materials. If you ever have to design a magazine or book, InDesign is your choice.

Use this as a chance to tell a story — and follow a typical story arc: background, opportunity, process, adversity along the way, triumphs, and outcome. Talk about what you did on the project but focus most on why this particular project was so interesting for you. Did it have to do with the people, circumstance, opportunity, or something else?

As a young designer, I like to talk about my first foray in design: Creating the user experience for a co-living space in Tokyo. This project was meaningful to me because it was my introduction to UX and trial by fire as a designer. I practiced UX principles in a physical space, was challenged with designing in a foreign context (Tokyo), and I was able to find success in ambiguity and uncertainty — when I started I really didn’t know what I was doing. Designing in a physical space provided a laboratory for me to observe, test and iterate in real time and built a foundation for how I now approach design problems in a digital context.