How to get ready for interview questions as a UX/UI Designer?

Job interviews are more or less stressful for everyone. But when we’re looking for a new job, we should be confident of our skills and be prepared for any circumstances. Yet, this isn’t how it looks like in real life.

When deciding to start searching for a new company where we could potentially be employed, we usually ask ourselves – what if I am not good enough, what if the responsibilities that I would have to deal with as a designer are beyond my current competencies? First of all, before looking for a new job, we should ask ourselves: why do we want to change the job? Will our current competencies allow us to get a better position?

Here you’ll learn how the UI and UX design interview process works and what interview questions you may expect. 

Get ready for the recruitment meeting

Before we start sending resumes to all possible companies in the world, let’s analyze our previous experience and skills, check for typos, mistakes, inconsistencies. It’s usually hard to judge ourselves with a critical eye – and vice versa – in superlatives. And it’s especially hard when we’re at the beginning of our design path and we don’t have a person who can help us (e.g. in the form of a mentor who could help us in creating our path, improving our skills, and catching mistakes that we make – both in terms of UX and UI). It’s really important to find someone who can tell you directly what you can change, in which direction you should, and who can guide you through your early career. 

It’s also quite important to complete your resume and portfolio with sincere intentions – don’t just do a quick concept of a project and upload it on Dribbble or Behance. Rember, in design work it’s quality that counts. Of course, experience is important but it’s not the most important. Passion for work, an eye for detail, and, above all, knowledge of the basic principles of design is already a good starting point!

It’s worth making in-depth research of the market – a detailed list of companies whose offers interest us and the requirements for a given position (how we fit into a given offer). Only then it’s best to start sending out your portfolio and resume to companies whose expectations we are likely to meet and which, most importantly, meet our expectations in terms of our key values.

I think the whole process of how to start a career path as a UX/UI designer is a topic for a separate entry and even maybe a webinar. So let’s focus on the topic of preparing for interview questions. 

What is important for UX Designers? Interviewer tips

• Your skills must match as closely as possible to the skills the company is looking for. If it turns out that you aren’t ready for such a change because you lack crucial skills – give yourself some time to improve and gain more experience. If your resume and portfolio will present the level that a given company expects, even if it’s not currently looking for employees – they may be interested in hiring another person to join the design team. 
• What is important for you are the real projects you have worked on and the most detailed list of responsibilities you have performed throughout your UX/UI career – the more detailed it’s going to be, the better. And the better your resume is completed, the more likely it’s that the interviewer will be interested and invite such a person for an interview.
• Write the truth. It often happens that candidates embellish their CVs with things they didn’t do as a UX/UI designer (which comes out during the interview anyway). Honesty is better than a lie. 
• Apart from technical skills, soft skills are also important – our work is really about contact with other people. Each designer has contact with clients (Polish and English-speaking) as we conduct workshops with them, we also communicate internally both within the design team and with other departments, so if you are shy or afraid of public speaking – it may turn out to be challenging for you. We are looking for people who are great at interacting with others, are bold, not afraid to express their opinion, and that can argue their decisions well. 
• A specific design approach – we assume that if you apply for a position of designer, you are passionate about it and you love to talk about it. We understand that because we have it as well. But remember that we want to learn as much as possible about you – cool, matter-of-fact answers are worth their weight in gold here. Our work is of course about storytelling, but it’s nice to balance it out. When you answer our questions it’s obvious which ones you don’t feel confident about, which ones you want to skip or which ones you want to talk us through. Of course, we know that stress does its job – just remember to be yourself and show your best side 🙂 

The recruitment process at Applover

The recruitment process for the role of designer consists of three steps. The first one is to get to know the candidate with the HR person responsible for recruitment. Then a technical meeting at which there is a person from the HR and team leader. And then if the candidate meets our expectations, we give the task part for which he has a week to prepare. If the task comes out well – we’ll have a short discussion and an offer for the candidate. We have written more about the whole recruitment process here.

What designer interview questions can you expect?

The interview always starts with us telling about the company, the team in which the potential candidate will work, and the flow of work. We want the candidate to learn about our processes from the beginning – at least in theory – and at this stage to have an idea of what the work, daily tasks, and the whole process we have been developing over the past year looks like.

During such designer interviews, we won’t avoid soft questions. Very often we ask about the reason for changing the job, what the company he/she would like to work should look like, what values are important for him/her, etc. We want to get to know you better, to see how you deal with such questions, whether you are specific. Soft skills play the first fiddle in our work – we are in touch with the client and the whole team, so we want the new person to fit into the team and be communicative, and teamwork wasn’t unfamiliar to him/her. 

The part of the recruitment process concerning technical skills is also crucial for us. We ask about your previous experience, what your design process looks like in practice, and your experience in designing mobile and web applications. We ask these interview questions to know how a potential candidate can manage our daily tasks. We don’t hide the fact that most of the UX/UI design projects are the above-mentioned mobile and web apps so we care about the designer’s experience in this area. 

An inherent part of the design process of our work is workshops with clients – when we ask about your experience in conducting them it’s because it’s important for us that the candidate already had contact with them. This is not an ordinary conversation but a creative workshop in which we (designers) are the main leaders. We manage the activities, we lead the narration, so unfortunately we won’t get along with a person who directly tells us that he can’t manage such activities and would prefer not to do it. The most important thing for us here is engagement! 

During the interview, we would also like to discuss difficult project situations in which the candidate participated as well as his/her reactions to stress. It happens in every profession and we want to know your experience in this area and how you would manage a potential problem.

Other issues that we raised during the interview are project estimation, contact with developers, and project organization – it is important for us that our candidate has experience in working with other departments and knows what autolayout is or how to organize a project for handoff to developers. This allows us to find out, among other things, if the person likes organization and order (in terms of projects on the Figma).

Be prepared for a UI/UX interview 

Please remember that recruitment is not scary and we want to get to know you and your project approach as well as possible 🙂 

The values that we live by every day in our work are above all support and team spirit. We are a team and we always help each other in project challenges, we share knowledge and we can count on each other. We communicate directly as we don’t have complex structures, both in the team and in the whole organization. We want everyone to have a real impact on the company’s development and we are open to suggestions and ideas from other people. 

If you would like to join our UX/UI design team or other departments – we encourage you to take part in current and future recruitment processes. Keep in mind that if you don’t see any recruitment for your position, it might be worth sending us your CV and portfolio anyway. 🙂