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. Middle: deeper understanding, optimization, and real-world situations.
Give a real task, watch silently, and resist explaining — the moment you explain, you have destroyed the finding. Five participants surface most of the serious problems in a flow, which is why testing early and often beats one large study. What you are collecting is where people hesitate, not whether they liked it.
Test when the decision is reversible, the traffic supports significance and both options are defensible. Just fix it when something is plainly broken — nobody needs an experiment to prove a form with unlabelled inputs is worse. Testing obvious fixes spends traffic that a real question needed.
Convert the reaction into a problem: what were you trying to do, where did it stop, what did you expect. Preference is not a requirement, but it is often a symptom of one that has not been articulated. Redesigning to taste rather than to the underlying issue is how a screen gets iterated for months and never improves.
The design plus the states nobody drew — empty, loading, error, long text, the longest name a real user has. Handoffs go wrong when the design shows only the happy path, because then the developer invents the rest and the invention is inconsistent. Tokens and spacing rules travel better than pixel measurements.
Ask for the least you can, in one column, with labels above fields rather than inside them — placeholder-as-label disappears the moment someone types. Validate inline and say what to do rather than what is wrong. The single biggest lever is removing fields, and it is the one nobody wants to hear.
How the content is organised and labelled so people can find things. You know it is wrong when search is the primary navigation, when the same item lives in two places, or when card sorting with real users produces a structure nothing like yours. Navigation problems are usually IA problems wearing a different hat.
In a real interview you speak under pressure. Cam asks these same questions, scores every answer, and shows exactly what to fix.
Practice a Middle UI/UX Designer interview →