How to ace your next UX Design interview - A step by step guide

Um, do I have any questions? In today's video, I'll give you the ultimate guide to acing your next UX/UI or product design interview. I'm making this video because I've been privileged to be on both sides of the design interview process, which means that I have interviewed for a couple of design roles and I have also interviewed a couple of designers as a design lead. So I have a good understanding of what it takes to elevate your interview game, impress your potential employers, and land your dream job. I should also mention that I have applied the technique in this guide in my last 5 interviews and I have seen a 100% success rate. To break this down easily, I'm going to be talking about the things that you need to do before your interview, during your interview, and after your interview. So stay with me. The first thing you need to do before your interview is to do your research. I know this is the obvious one, but a lot of people get it wrong at this stage. A lot of people think that doing your research about company before interviewing with them is just going to the website and spending 5 minutes skimming through the landing page. But you need to go deeper than that. You need to understand the products and services that this company offers, what are their values, and then you need to start to understand what are the latest news about the company. These are important news that can help you to strike up conversations during your interviews. Also, a lot of CEOs and executives at companies are guests on podcasts or guests on design blogs, so So you can start to understand about the company from the lens of the CEO by also trying to see which podcasts they've been on, listening to them, and seeing what they think about what they do at the company or just what their general work is. One of the things that recruiters also do when they schedule an interview is to let you know the people that you're going to be interviewing with. Sometimes you might find out that you have like 2 or 3 designers that are going to be on your panel for interview. Check out these designers on LinkedIn, look out if they have their portfolio website up, see the works they've done. And see maybe they've also written some articles or some publications that would start helping you to understand the kind of designer that you might be speaking with and what might be their interest as a designer. So this starts to help you to familiarize yourself with the people that you're going to be interviewing with so that when you get to the interview on the interview day, it doesn't feel like you're speaking to total strangers. Because once you see everybody in front of you and you've done some kind of background check on them, it feels like you're speaking with people that you already know, and that would make you way more relaxed. And comfortable in your interview. The next thing you need to do is to prepare your story. At the beginning of the interview, the interviewers will ask you to tell them about yourself, and this is where you want to be able to have a story at hand. Don't just think that you should wing this or don't feel like, oh, this is my personal story, so I should be able to tell it anyhow, right? You need to be able to prepare this beforehand. So a couple of days before your interview, you should have an idea of what your story is going to look like. Focus on some of the impacts that you've had in your previous roles and a little bit of your background as well. Maybe your educational background, Especially if that background actually influences who you are as a designer at that interview. So when preparing your story, think about the impact that you've had in your previous role. Think about your background and see how everything connects together to tell a memorable story. If the particular interview is your first design job, which means that you don't have any prior design experience, talk about the things that you've done before that interview that is impactful, the ways that you've solved problems that can help them see you as a good fit for a UX design role. In their organization. It could maybe you've done some volunteering, or maybe you've worked on some side projects that you feel like you've been able to have some meaningful impact on. The important thing here is to make sure that whatever story that you're telling about yourself at that point in time is concise and is also memorable. In my own case, I always make sure that I limit the story about myself to 3 to 5 minutes so that I don't take up all the time, and then we can move on to other stuff. The next thing you need to do is to practice scenario-based questions. Scenario-based questions are hypothetical questions that show how you would act in a certain scenario. Practicing scenario-based questions helps you to understand how to answer questions in interviews. An example of a scenario-based question could be, tell me about the time that you've had a disagreement with a colleague and how you were able to come to a resolution, or tell me about your biggest work achievement, or tell me about your biggest work failure. It's important to have a method in which you're going to use to answer these questions. The popular method is the STAR method, which is basically the scenario, the task, the action, and then the result. It's always good to use this method to answer questions because it helps you to answer the question in a very clear manner. First of all, you talk about the scenario in which that particular situation occurred, and then the task that you were asked to do, the action that you did, and the result. You could also have other methods that you follow, but make sure that when answering scenario-based questions, you have a clear context, and then you have a clear action, and then the clear impact or result. Of that action. The last thing you need to do before your interview is to prepare your questions. It is very, very important to ask questions in an interview for 2 reasons. The first reason is that when you ask questions, it also makes them know that this person that we are interviewing is interested in this organization and wants to know a couple of things about how we operate. The second reason is you are being interviewed and you are also interviewing the company as well, so you want to know if this is somewhere that you would like to work in. So it's very, very important to ask questions. It's also important for you to prepare those questions beforehand so you don't just get to the interview and then they ask you if you have any question and then you're thinking, um, do I have any questions? Uh, nah, don't do that. You should have an idea of the questions that you want to ask beforehand, and this is what doing your research helps you with. So while you're doing your research and seeing what products and services the company does, or listening to a podcast by the CEO of the company, or reading an article by one of the designers in the company, you can start to bring up questions from that. Also, there are a lot of questions that you could ask as a designer, and if you want a video on questions that you could ask in a UX design interview, please drop a comment below and I'll be sure to respond. Now your interview has started and your interviewers have introduced themselves. You'll be expected to introduce yourself as well. This is where the story that you've prepared before the interview comes in. Remember to focus on the impact that you've had in your previous roles and how you've been able to solve problems in the past. After you're done with the introductions, here are some hacks that can help you to ace the rest of the interview. Firstly, be honest during your interview. One of the worst things that you can do to yourself is to lie when you don't have the right answer to a question or when you don't understand the question. First of all, try to understand every question that you are asked. If you know the answer, by all means, make sure that you answer that in a truthful and compelling manner. But if you do not know the answer to that question, do not lie. Be honest with your feedback in interviews, and you could let the recruiter know Oh, I don't have an experience in this particular area, but I've been able to do a similar thing in this different way, or I'm looking forward to learning about how I can apply this in the next project or in my next role. Secondly, come armed with data. Whenever you're asked questions about how you were able to arrive at a particular solution, always make sure you talk about how you've been able to move a metric. Always talk about the data that was available before you proposed that design solution. What data did you get from research, and how has that data changed since the design has been developed, or since you've been able to profile that design solution. In cases where you don't have data, you can talk about the design rationale that helped you to arrive at that particular design solution, or you could talk about the business objective that helped you to arrive at that particular solution. The important thing here is that when you speak about how you've been able to move a metric, or how you've been able to influence your design decisions because of a business objective or a design rationale, it helps the interviewers to understand that you're not just pushing pixels around on the screen, or you're not just designing for the beauty of it. It shows that you think about things rationally and you're data-driven, and this is a very, very good sign of a fit for a UX design role in any organization. Also, during your interview, the most important question that the interviewers might ask is, why do you want to join this organization? Or how do you see yourself bringing value to this organization? This question is very, very important because it represents an opportunity for you to talk about what makes you unique and why you're a good fit for a design role in that organization. Your answer could be a mix of your personal values as a designer and the values of the company as well, and how you see everything come together. And also the things that you're looking for in your next role, things that you think that can challenge you in your next role, and the kind of problems that you think that you want to solve that also aligns with the kind of problem that the company might want to solve as well. So you see that this is where the research that you've done at the beginning becomes important. So whatever you found out from some of the challenges that you see that the company might be experiencing from the research you've done should be something that you bake into your answer. And if there's anything that you've gathered from some of the interviews that the CEO has granted or something that you've seen from an article that one of the designers has written about, you could put all of these things together to talk about why you see yourself adding value to this organization. Organization and why you want to join the organization. Here, the most important thing is to make sure that whatever answer that you give is very, very memorable. You want them to be nodding their heads while you're answering this question, and this is how you walk right into the organization. Now you're done with your interview and you're probably exhausted. At this point, you just want to sink in the sofa and think about everything that you might have done wrong, or maybe you feel like you've had a really good interview you want to reward yourself with a bowl of ice cream and some Netflix or any other guilty pleasures that you might indulge in. Whatever the case may be, there's one last thing that you need to do after your interview, and that is to assess your performance. You want to take about 5 to 10 minutes to think about some of the questions or answers that you struggled with during the interview and list those questions and answers down so that you can improve on them in future interviews. This way, you're preparing for the worst while hoping for the best. That will be all for this video. Just for a recap, remember to do your research before your interview, be honest and ask questions during your interview, and assess your performance after your interview. If you like watching this video, you can watch other videos I made on common mistakes that beginner UX designers make. Please make sure you like and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this. I wish you all the best in your next interviews, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.