Designer interviews are less about tools and more about process: how you research, how you justify decisions, and how you work with constraints. Below are the most common questions with model answers. Junior: core theory, definitions, and simple practical cases.
UX is how the thing works — the flow, the structure, whether someone can finish the task. UI is how it looks and how the controls behave. A beautiful interface over a flow nobody can complete is a UI success and a UX failure, which is the distinction the question is really asking about.
A wireframe is structure without styling — it answers what goes where. A mockup adds the visual design. A prototype is clickable and answers whether the flow works. Each exists to get a different question answered cheaply, and skipping straight to a polished mockup means arguing about colour before anyone knows if the flow makes sense.
A component library is the code. A design system is the components plus the rules — spacing, type scale, tokens, and the decisions about when to use which. Without the rules, a library becomes forty variants of a button and nobody knows which is correct.
The order in which the eye takes things in, which should match the order of importance. It comes from size, weight, colour, contrast and space — and space is the one people under-use. If everything is emphasised, nothing is, which is why a screen with three primary buttons has none.
That people using a screen reader, a keyboard, or with low vision or colour blindness can complete the task. The minimum is real: sufficient contrast, a visible focus state, labels on inputs, alt text that says something, and a page that works without a mouse. Most of it costs nothing if it is done from the start.
As a checklist for reviewing an interface without users — visibility of system status, match with the real world, user control, consistency, error prevention and so on. They find the obvious problems cheaply, which is what makes them worth running before a usability test rather than instead of one.
In a real interview you speak under pressure. Cam asks these same questions, scores every answer, and shows exactly what to fix.
Practice a Junior UI/UX Designer interview →