Preparing for Entry-Level UX Design Interviews

Aspiring UX designers should master storytelling frameworks to effectively convey their design processes and experiences during interviews.

### Preparing for an Entry-Level Role in UX Design: Essential Tips and Strategies
* 🎨 To effectively prepare for an entry-level role in UX design, it's crucial to understand the **STAR method**, which stands for **Situation, Task, Action, and Result**, to structure your responses during interviews.
* 🖥 An example of using this framework is identifying a situation where users are **not clicking the install button** on an app's details page, followed by the task of **improving the UI to boost conversion rates**.
* 🔍 Familiarizing yourself with popular design frameworks, such as the **Double Diamond**, can help articulate your design process and demonstrate your **readiness to contribute effectively** in a new role.
* 📊 Be prepared to discuss your portfolio, summarizing projects, the **design challenges faced**, and reflecting on what you learned and what you would do **differently**.
* 🤝 Expect questions about how you handle disagreements or conflicts regarding design choices, showcasing your **emotional intelligence** and **ability to collaborate with others**.
* 💬 Active listening during the interview is vital; it allows you to **respond thoughtfully and show genuine interest** in the conversation, while also giving you **time to formulate your answers**.
* 💡 Researching the company beforehand and aligning your values with theirs can **significantly strengthen your responses**, especially when asked **why you want to work there**.
* 📝 Lastly, practice articulating your thoughts **clearly and concisely** to avoid rambling, which will help you present yourself as a **strong candidate** during the interview process.

okay, today we're going to talk about something that I really, really, really, really, really hate: interviews. And I feel like I'm not alone here. A lot of us hate interviews, and for those of you who like interviews, what is wrong with you? I'm just kidding; we love our extroverted friends here, so you're welcome to stay. I have tips for you too, but for me, the idea of going to interviews, and especially in Tech where you have tons of interviews, that's terrible. So, as an introverted person, and I actually have a little bit of social anxiety too, which if you saw my video on social anxiety, you would know. Did you? Okay, does not that many views, so I don't know if you did. But anyways, as someone that has a little bit of social anxiety and is introverted, I don't particularly enjoy interviews. So, coming in as prepared as possible is the only way for me to feel like I can succeed. So, in today's video, I'm going to go over some of the more common and not

so common questions that you can expect to get if you're going for an entry-level or an internship role, and maybe for some senior roles. They'll ask some of the more common ones, but this will be mainly focused on Junior and entry-level and like internship roles. So, this first set of questions is going to be all about helping the interviewer get to know you. So, the first question that you can expect is something around tell me about yourself. I hope you already have your little pitch ready for that, but really, you just want to give some information about you, like where you're from, some fun facts about your background, and an idea of what your interests are in a short amount of time. You don't want to dwell on this question too much. You want to highlight some of the skills that make you a good candidate for the role. Along with that question, you should be ready to talk about how you got into design, and I don't know if all of the interviews are going to

ask you that, but this could be a nice follow-up to the tell me about yourself is talk about how you got into the sign, what got you interested, do you have any background that could influence you as a UX designer and make you a unique candidate. Is there anything in your background that ties you to the company? Like if you're working for a video game company, do you have experience with video games? Are you a gamer? Can you bring that user experience into the role? All of those things that make you unique would be great things to talk about if someone asked you the question of tell me about how you got into design. Another question that you could be asked is where do you look for inspiration? or this could be also tied into how do you stay up to date with the latest trends? You could show that you have diverse interests that are related to design, but then you also want to make sure that what you're saying relates to UX, especially if you're a junior or an entry-level.

designer because you're most likely going to be working on a lot of tactical projects, so you want to make sure that you are able to express that you can find patterns and trends that you can then incorporate into your role. Okay, another question that you should be ready for, and I was asked this question, What is your design process? and honestly, for this, I would pick a framework that is popular in terms of the design process, something like the Double Diamond, and then use that as a way to frame your answer because you want to make sure that you convey that you are familiar with common processes and design processes that then can translate easily to whatever role you're going to be applying to. So definitely something like the Double Diamond would be a great way to show that you understand the process and that you're going to be able to start contributing as soon as possible when you join the role. Also, I want to say that it's getting hard to keep up

with the videos in terms of how much the channel is GR in terms of subscribers. Like we're already past 700. In the last video, I was celebrating the fact that we were almost at 600. So thank you all so much to everyone that has subscribed, liked on the videos, and supported me. But right now, the channel is really small, so take advantage of that. Leave your questions in the comments because I will get to them at our current scale. But there will be a point where I won't be able to take advantage that you're here early. And also, please hit the like and subscribe to the video. And please watch the entire video. We're getting really close to 1,000, but I still have some ways to go for the watch hour. So if you want to support me, please watch as much as the videos, and that will really help support the channel and monetize it faster. So now we're getting into the project questions.

this section can take many different forms. It could be you walking through your portfolio. It could be the interviewer reading your portfolio and asking you questions based on a project that they looked at. But this is all about questions specific to a portfolio, and you should be ready to give a summary of that project, talk about what you learned, talk about what the project was about, what the design problem that you were tackling was, if it was a group project, what you did, what your specific responsibilities were. And then once you give an overview of that project, you should get ready to talk about what you would have done differently. You know how we talked in the case study. If you haven't seen the case study video, check it out up here. But you should get ready to talk about your reflection. So in the case study, we had a section about takeaways, like what you learned. So whenever you're going over your project and you've already summarized it, you

should get ready to answer questions about what you would have done differently, what did you learn. This is going to be something that potentially the interviewer will want to ask just to get a sense of how you would handle projects, what you would learn from them, how you would grow in the position. Another form that this question could take is what were the biggest challenges that you faced in the project and how did you tackle them. So, you want to be honest with this question but not just provide what the challenge is, but then also how you solved it and how you improved the situation. This is similar to like in a more senior role, they might ask you how you manage stakeholders or you manage stakeholder expectations, how do you deal with difficult situations to resolve the problems. Like, you always want to present that situation but also come up with how you solved it. You're going to be working with a lot of different people, and there will inevitably be disagreeing opinions.

and conflict, and you might be called upon to use design as a tool to bring everyone together. So, definitely think about solutions and ways that you handle tough challenges during that project. Also, if you anticipate these questions, you can set yourself up for success because you can then choose a project in your portfolio that can serve as a good story for a lot of these questions and give you the information and the experiences needed for you to look your best during the interview. Another behavioral question that could come up is a question around describing a situation where your designs were not accepted or someone disagreed with your design choices. So, definitely in this question, you want to be able to showcase emotional intelligence. You want to be able to showcase that you can resolve conflicts. You want to be able to show that you are someone that's easy to work with. You can advocate for the user, but then at the same time, you're able to come to an agreement and to a compromise with the team so that you basically help the

team move forward, and then also you can expect some questions about user research. In a lot of places, user research is not given the value that it deserves, and some companies don't even have researchers. So, you could be asked about how you incorporate research into your work and what part of the process do you incorporate research. How do you use it? How do you leverage research to validate your design solutions? So, these you can expect some sort of question around research and how do you incorporate it into your work. And then, along those lines, you might be asked about how you use data to inform your designs. So, this is something that is a little bit harder if you haven't worked on real projects, but in a lot of projects, after the design phase and after your designs are approved and you move into the experimentation phase, you will start to get data from those learning experiments, and then you can use that data to improve your design, especially if you're doing A/B testing or you're comparing different options. If you've had experience with

these types of projects or you've experienced working in this part of the development process. Then you want to highlight that, but if not, then you can focus on user research and talk about qualitative and quantitative data from user research that you've performed in your project. Another way to incorporate user research is to talk about how user research impacted or changed a design decision or a design approach that you had for one of your projects. So potentially, you originally had a particular idea of what you thought the design solution was for a particular pain, for a particular problem, but then after performing user research, you realize that you were solving for the wrong problem or that the solution that you had was not the appropriate one for the problem that you were trying to tackle. And you can talk about how you changed your designs or your design direction based on the data that you gathered. That would be a great way to show that you have an understanding of how to incorporate all of these different aspects into your own work. Another one

would be being asked about ambiguity. So, how would you potentially work on a project where there are no requirements, where you're not clear what you're trying to solve for? They basically want to assess how you work on defining the problem, working with your researchers and your cross-functional partners to really understand what it is that you're trying to solve for. How do you actually turn it into a tactical project that then you can put into a roadmap and start working towards that end goal? This is all about working in a space where you're not really sure what the solution is, and you're not really clear about which problem you should tackle. So, definitely a more advanced question that could be asked. I think as long as you have an understanding around the type of questions that you can get asked, then you can prepare yourself to have a narrative and have some anecdotes ready for when those questions are asked. But in reality, it's really hard to predict what

all the questions are going to be asked during an interview because a lot of interviews are very organic. So, depending on what you answer to a particular question, the interviewer could ask you something different, and there could be a follow-up question that you didn't even prepare for. So, just remember that interviews are organic, but you want to make sure that you have the more common questions ironed out so that you don't have to stress during the interview about being blindsided with a question that you were not prepared for. And honestly, it might still happen because you don't really know what they're going to ask you in the end. So, now that we've covered the main questions, I want to give you some general tips for the interviews. So, the first tip is to try to not ramble on. You don't want to go into too much detail. You want to make sure that you are as cohesive with your answers as possible. At the same time, you want to make sure that you use real-life

examples when it's pertinent something that we use at Google for different things is called star so it stands for situation task action and result and what that means is basically you're using that framework to structure your answers in a way that's almost like a story right so one example for a situation is people are not clicking on the install button in The Details page for the App Store so the task that was given let's say that for me my task was to figure out how to improve the UI of the detail spage in the App Store to improve the conversion rate for the install button and then the action is basically you explaining the process that you took how did you solve the problem who did you work with and then finally you want to explain what was the result so what was the outcome of all the work that you did did you improve the conversion rate did you impr improve the click-through rate did you learn something specifically was the project launch this is a

great way for you to basically frame the story in your head and then being able to convey it to the interviewer in a way that is both actionable but also memorable and easy to understand. Another tip that I wanted to share is to, I don't want to say like try to be confident in the interview because the reality is that most of us get nervous, right? I mean, you don't want to show up and being all scared and not being able to answer questions, but just try to be yourself, be honest, and if this is a company that you're really excited about, build that connection with the person that's interviewing you. Ask questions. You should think about this interview as not just them interviewing you, but you also interviewing the company. You want to make sure that you ask them about the culture of the company. You want to make sure that you ask them about what's their design process, what are the resources for designers, how mature is the design department in the company. You want to leave

with an understanding that this company would be a good fit for you, and the only way to do that is by asking the interviewer questions as well. Another tip is to practice active listening. Listen to the interviewer when they're talking to you so you can respond to them with the most relevant answer possible and show them that you can listen and that you can pay attention. Actually, the idea of active listening is that you also get out of your head, and you can focus on the interviewer instead of focusing on yourself and if you're feeling nervous. So, that's one strategy to also make yourself feel more at ease, is to really focus on the person interviewing you and not so much on yourself. Also, another tip is to feel free to take time to think. I know that in the moment we want to respond as fast as possible, but something that is completely acceptable is to let the interviewer know to give you a second to pull your thoughts together and really think about the question and

come up with the best answer that is totally fine. You don't have to blurt out something; you can take a pause, let the interviewer know, and take some time to think about what you want to say. Another tip is to go into the interview having researched the company. You want to make sure that they know the company because you will definitely be asked why you want to work here, and that's definitely going to be a question. You want to make sure that you somehow align your own values and your interests with the values and the goals of the company, and that's something that you can bring up when they ask you why do you want to work here. So, I just gave you all of these examples for the interview questions, tips on how to manage yourself and the interview, and also a framework for how to structure your answers. So, I think you're ready to go ahead and apply for your internship or your roles. So, go ahead and check out my video on how to apply for a UX internship or my playlist on

How to prepare yourself for an entry-level role in UX design. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.

UX/UI Interview Questions with Answers & Tips! (from a Google UX Designer)

Ricardo Hernandez Perez

Growing YouTube Channel and Interview Tips

The channel has surpassed 700 subscribers and is approaching 1,000, with a plea for viewers to watch the videos to help with monetization.

The speaker emphasizes the importance of being yourself and building a connection during interviews, while also encouraging candidates to ask questions about the company's culture and design process.

The speaker discusses the challenge of working on projects with unclear requirements and the importance of defining the problem and collaborating with others to find a solution.

Navigating Portfolio Questions in Interviews

Interviewers may ask about specific projects in your portfolio, requiring you to summarize the project, your role, and what you learned.

Be prepared to discuss challenges you faced and how you tackled them, as well as what you would have done differently.

Common introductory questions may include telling the interviewer about yourself and your journey into design, so have a concise pitch and highlight your relevant skills ready.

Anticipate behavioral questions about handling conflict and design disagreements, showcasing emotional intelligence and conflict resolution skills.

Highlight your unique background and experiences that tie you to the company during the "tell me about yourself" question.

Research the company beforehand to align your values and interests with theirs, and take your time to think before answering questions.

User research is often undervalued, leading to questions about its incorporation into design work.

Data from learning experiments and A/B testing can be used to inform and improve design solutions.

Highlighting the impact of user research on design decisions and being prepared for organic interview questions are key strategies for success.

Asking the interviewer questions is crucial to determine if the company is a good fit for you.

Practicing active listening can help you respond with relevant answers and ease your nerves.

Taking time to think before responding and being prepared can also contribute to a successful interview experience.

Preparing for an Entry-Level UX Design Role

Using the STAR framework (Situation, Task, Action, Result) can help structure your answers in a storytelling format during interviews.

Familiarizing yourself with a popular design process framework, like the Double Diamond, can demonstrate your understanding of common design processes.

Being able to express your ability to find patterns and trends will showcase your potential to contribute effectively in the role.