A Guide to the

Design Interview

Applying to our team should be accessible to anyone, so we've put this guide together so you know what to expect during your interview.

General Advice

• Focus on the approach. We’re more interested in seeing how you think about problems rather than whether or not you can solve them.

• Be your authentic self. We value new perspectives and will do our best to create a comfortable, unstressful environment.

• Ask questions if you need clarification. It shows that you know how and when to ask for help.

The goal of this interview is to better understand you as a person and teammate. We want to learn more about you as a person and how you work in a team setting.

The goal of this interview is to get a better understanding of your product thinking, intentionality, and overall process. We want to understand how you approach problems and design solutions for them.

Be prepared to tell a story about 1 of your projects (your Intro to DPD project counts!) and share context about goals, challenges, process, visual samples, and prototypes (if applicable). This interview will last approximately 20 minutes.

Tips for the interview

• Know your case study inside and out, we'll be curious about how you justify design decisions

• Try to touch on all 3 pillars of design: product thinking, interaction design, and visual design

• Practice your presentation with designers and non-designers to clearly communicate your work

• We highly recommend designing a slide deck or other presentation but it is not required

The goal of this interview is to better understand how you break down problems and work through your design process. The interviewer will provide you with the challenge, and you will complete it during the interview. This interview will last approximately 30 minutes. We’ll follow the framework from this resource for the interview.

Be prepared to walk us through your thought process and discuss how you made your design decisions. This challenge is not for evaluating your visual design skills! You should spend most of specifying the challenge and creating the user journey.

Tips for the interview

• Talk us through your thought process! Ask questions, write notes, and approach it as a conversations

• Think intentionally about how your design decisions solve the user problem

• Be open to feedback, but also be able to defend your design decisions

• Don’t worry about making your sketches look pretty