Product Design Interview Questions

Undeniably, Product Design plays a pivotal role in building effective products. Using product design concepts, we can accurately define user requirements, design, and create prototypes. We can also test prototypes to validate the effectiveness of the designs. When it comes to product designers, they must have solid knowledge in identifying user requirements. Also, They must be good at handling multiple design tools, prototyping, and testing tools. That's why cracking product design interviews has become crucial nowadays.

MindMajix helps aspirants who are preparing for Product Design Interviews by offering the Top 35 Product Design Interview Questions. In this blog, you can find Product Design Interview Questions and Answers with sharp answers related to product design, its different phases, methods used, and much more. 

By considering the convenience of learners, MindMajix content experts have parted this blog into different sections as follows.

• Beginners Level 
• Intermediate Level 
• Advanced Level 
• FAQs
• Tips

Top 10 Product Design Frequently Asked Questions

1. What do you understand by Design Thinking?
2. What are the Steps involved in a Journey Map?
3. What do you mean by A/B Testing?
4. What Stages are involved in a Typical Product Design?
5. What do you Understand by HCD in Product Design?
6. What different tools do Product Designers use for Efficient Design?
7. Why do you think Product Design Testing is Important?
8. What are the Various Obstacles that could slow the Product Design Process?
9. What are the necessary Skills required for a Product Designer?
10. How would you make an Effective Product Design?

Beginner Level Product Design Interview Questions

1. What do you mean by Product Design?

The sequential process is used to visualize, design, prototype, and test products. Understanding the user requirements is the baseline of product design. This is because product design includes defining user problems and creating products to solve the issues.

If you want to enrich your career and become a professional in Product Design, then enroll in "Product Design Life Cycle Training".This course will help you to achieve excellence in this domain.

2. What do you Understand by Design Thinking?

You can use it to understand users, identify their problems, create innovative solutions, prototype, and test them. With design thinking, you can offer handy solutions to users' needs. You can develop innovative solutions to user requirements by collaborating with multiple teams. In short, design thinking is a human-centered and innovative design approach.

 

3. What do you mean by Journey Maps?

Journey Maps are the visual form of a user journey made to achieve a specific goal. A typical journey map details users' actions, thoughts, and emotions on the entire journey. Note that the critical components of a customer journey include the actor, users' expectations, scenarios, actions, journey phases, users' thoughts and emotions, and opportunities.

 

 

4. What are the Steps involved in a Journey Map?

A user may use the following steps to accomplish a task. They are given as follows:         

• Sign up or log in
• Defining the goals
• Receiving a task
• Performing the task
• Tracking the progress.

5. What do you Understand by User Persona, and How to Create it?

A user Persona is nothing but a semi-fictional character you can create from the interactions made with various users. User persona provides a clear picture of how a user searches for a product, buys, and uses it. Mainly, customer demographic and psychographic data help create an accurate user persona. With this valuable data, you can improve the product and user experience to greater heights.

6. What do you mean by A/B Testing?

A/B Testing is also referred to as Split Testing. It means that the user group is split into two groups. or else two user groups are chosen from a large user pool. Performing A/B Testing will improve the user experience and improve the conversion rate. It is also known as the bucket testing method.

In this Testing, the users are given two versions of a product design. The version appreciated by users will be considered for the final design. You can apply the statistical tools to compare the two versions and arrive at a concrete conclusion. Note that the design can be a page element, web page, and so on.

 

 

7. What Stages are involved in a Typical Product Design?

• Research on user requirements
• Ideation of solutions
• Visualization and design
• Prototyping
• Usability Testing

8. What is the most vital thing you must focus on in a Product Design?

Understanding the end-user requirements accurately is essential in the Product Design process. When we understand the end user's needs, we can define the problems and design suitable products.

9. What are the different Characteristics of Product Design?

• Product design is a complex process that begins with user research and ends with testing prototypes.
• Product design is much human-centered approach. It means that it solves problems closely associated with humans. However, it considers market requirements and business goals too.
• In a way, product design is a never-ending process. Anyone can improvise the products based on user requirements, additional research, and better solutions.

 

10. What is the Use of Usability Testing?

By Performing Usability Testing, you can evaluate the user-friendliness of a product. In simple words, you can identify whether or not the product is easy to use – from the end-users perspective. Also, you can measure the efficiency of the product as well. The usability testing results help make the product simpler and easy to use. For example, you can improve UI controls, navigation facilities, etc.

11. What do you Understand by HCD in Product Design?

• Know that HCD stands for Human Centered Design. It is a problem-solving approach applied to solve human problems and requirements. This approach covers users' needs and their pain points in-depth, thereby it allows producing effective and innovative products.
• It is essential to note that there are three phases in every Human-Centered approach. They are an inspiration, ideation, and finally, implementation.

12. What do you Understand by Product Design Framework?

Product Design is usually built based on a framework. In this regard, design thinking is one of the popular frameworks for integrating people, technology, and business requirements in a single place.

13. What different Tools do Product Designers use for Efficient Design?

• Journey Mapping Apps
• Graphic Design Apps
• Wireframing Apps
• Prototyping Tools
• CAD Software
• Project Management Apps such as Trello
• Research and Data analytics tools such as A/B testing apps
• Product Roadmap Apps such as ProductPlan.

14. Mention a few Go-to tools for Product Design.

• Adobe XD
• Flowmapp
• InVision
• Zeplin
•  Adobe Illustrator
• Hotjar
• Miro
• Bubble
• Webflow

15. List out some of the Product Design Prototyping Tools.

• Invision
• Proto.io
• Usabilla
• Balsamiq
• Figma
• Axure

Intermediate Level Product Design Interview Questions

16. Can you differentiate Product Design and UX Design?

Product Design	UX Design
It focuses on the entire product design. It includes customer journey, user research, and user interface as well.	UX Design mainly focuses on user interaction. It deals with refining user experience and improving user satisfaction.
Product Designers must be familiar with all the business processes. It allows them to design a valuable product.	UX Designers must be familiar with the product's user navigation and interaction.
In a way, Product Designers must be strong leaders who need to interact with visual designers, UX designers	They usually have a narrow Operation role. The user is the main resource element for UX designers.
They must have Solid expertise in Design Thinking as well as prototyping.	They must be good at user research, creating user personas, and interaction design.

17. Why do you think Product Design Testing is Important?

• We can identify issues in the earlier stages of the product design and rectify them as soon as they are found.
• We can identify the effectiveness of resources and allocate the right resources.
• We can check whether the implemented product design methods are effective or not.
• We can enhance user experience and satisfaction on greater scales
• We can show the test results to stakeholders to make them understand the effectiveness of the product design.

18. Name Some of the Product Design Testing Methods.

 Following are some required Testing Methods we can use to Test Product Designs.

• Concept Validation: In this testing, you can collect feedback from actual and potential users about the product design. You can use paper prototypes, drawings, and presentations for this test.
• Usability Task Analysis: By completing this test, you can verify that users can use the product seamlessly. You can analyze the behavior as well as the experience of users through page movements, clicks, etc.
• First-click Testing: This test helps to identify where users click for the first time when they visit a page. Performing this test, you can locate which buttons or icons users use for the very first time. Along with that, you can identify which one fails to get noticed by users.
• Card Sorting: In this testing, users use both physical and visual cards to move the items in the design in the way they think is the best fit. It will help to understand the user experience and the best-fit design.
• Tree Testing: First, a product map is prepared, including the tree hierarchy of the product. After that, users are asked to perform specific tasks on the product map. This process will help to find the user experience with more detail.
• User Feedback: Conducting surveys and user interviews are a few methods that will provide more accurate feedback about the product than no other method. Using this method, you can collect users' feedback directly instead of containing numbers and graphs.
• Split Testing: In this testing, users are divided into two groups and given different page or product versions. The best version desired by the users will be finalized in the end.

 

 

19. What are the Various Obstacles that could slow the Product Design Process?

• You need to perform user research and problem identification accurately. In other words, making irrelevant product design for a user requirement wastes time and resources.
• The expectations of clients must be aligned with product design goals. To achieve this, you need to communicate with clients closely.
• Poor communication will result in inefficient product design. Making intimate communication between different teams is crucial to building an efficient product design.
• No doubt, last-minute changes are one of the critical obstacles that every product designer might face. However, they need to be addressed them tactfully.

20. Can you name a few recent Trends in Product Design?

• Code-based design
• Typography
• Material design 3
• Motion graphics and micro-interactions
• Dark mode
• VR UX  and The Metaverse
• Voice user interface (VCI) design
• Cardboard Eco-Look

21. What are the necessary Qualities of a Product Designer?

• A competent product designer must have a high degree of analytical skills. This is because they need to go through the user feedback to figure out the gaps in the effectiveness of products.
• They must have substantial knowledge of business processes to identify the gaps and make designs accordingly easily.

22. What are the necessary Skills required for a Product Designer?

• A product designer should have good interaction skills.
• They should have good user research and communication skills
• They should have good prototyping and decision-making skills.
• Having good skills in design tools, such as Figma, Sketch, etc., will be an advantage.
• Importantly, they must have good visual design skills and user testing
• They should be good at system thinking and conceptualization.

 

 

23. Can you mention different Product Design processes and Design Methods?

The Product Design processes may have the following phases.

• The research phase – user interviews, contextual inquiry, online surveys,  and market research
• Analysis and positioning phase
• Conceptual design phase
• Detailed design phase
• Design prototyping phase – Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch, and Invision.
• Testing – Moderated usability testing, guerilla testing, unmoderated usability testing, and dogfooding.

24. What do you mean by Product Thinking?

Product Thinking is nothing but a cognitive process that a product designer applies to design and solves a user requirement. Identifying user requirements is an essential aspect of product thinking. In a way, Product Thinking reduces the gap between business and users by resolving users' problems and needs.

 

 

25. What are the Key Metrics that will help Product Designers?

• System Usability Scale (SUS): It is a quick and effective tool that you can use to get feedback on a product design in terms of its usability. You can prepare a questionnaire with over ten questions and various options.
• Completion Rates: It is one of the basic usability metrics. You can identify the usability of a product very accurately through this metric. With Google Analytics and Kissmetrics, you can find the completion rates.
• Net Promotion Score (NPS): With this metric, you can quickly identify users' loyalty towards a product.

 

 

Advanced Level Product Design Interview Questions

26. How would you ensure that you have done the right Product Design?

We can ensure this by validating product design through various quantitative and qualitative methods as listed below:

Quantitative

• Quantitative Survey
• A/B testing
• Data Analysis
•  Metrics Monitoring
• Pilot Testing

Qualitative

• Usability Testing
• User Feedback
• Eye Tracking
• Heuristic Analysis

 

27. Outline the different Usability Testing Methods.

• Moderated Usability Testing: A moderator will support you while performing usability testing.
• Unmoderated Usability Testing: There won't be any support from any guide or moderator in this testing.
• Guerilla Testing: The users are selected randomly and asked to perform quick usability testing in this testing.
• Dogfooding: In this testing, in-house testing is performed before releasing a product to the public.

28. How would you perform an efficient Product Design Testing method?

• First and foremost, you need to define the testing questions clearly.
• Then, you need to use different types of users or participants
• Users must be allowed to express their views openly without any external influence
• You must collaborate with teams and users to perform tests effectively. And at the same time, you need to communicate accurately with stakeholders about the test results. 

29. What are the three Prime Elements of a Product Design?  

The following are the three Prime Elements of a Product Design. They are given as follows

• The operational use of the product
• The visualization of the product
• The quality and outcome of the product

30. What are the crucial responsibilities of a typical Product Designer?

• Designing: Although a typical product designer does many vital activities, their main task is to design products.
• Testing: A product designer performs A/B testing, UX research, etc. Also, they build wireframes, prototypes, journey maps, and so on.
• Collaboration: A product designer closely communicates with designers, researchers, and other teams. It will help product designers move in the right direction, meeting users' business goals and expectations. 

31. What are the Common mistakes that occur in a Product Design?

• You need to make the right combo of function and aesthetics. During the design phase, you must analyze target users, proven results, etc. This approach will help you avoid making ineffective designs.
• While fixing deadlines, you must set realizable and concrete deadlines. If you cannot go by the assigned deadlines, it will affect productivity, undoubtedly.
• Making project documentation must be clear and accurate. It must help teams and customers with the product without missing any detail.
• You must be thorough in the freshness of the product idea. Otherwise, it will be a waste of time and cost
• You shouldn't hesitate to use expertise in your product design if needed. Mainly, it will save time and add value to your project.

32. How would you make an Effective Product Design?

• First and foremost, you must thoroughly understand your customers or users. You need to assess their requirements accurately.
• Next, you need to encounter problems in the design process boldly and cleverly. If you postpone any issue, it will become a big problem later. So you need to solve issues instantly to proceed with the design successfully.
• Last but not the least, you need to plan your project abundantly. Otherwise, if there is a shortage of money in the middle of the project would delay the product design completion. Sometimes, it will end up with a partially completed product design.

33. How would you manage Challenges if they arose from Stakeholders during a Product Design Process?

Collaboration is the only solution to solve a challenge. You must communicate with the stakeholders to determine the actual problem and its depth. After that, you must interact with your team to brainstorm solutions to the challenge. Once the solution is found, it must be communicated to the stakeholders. Finally, the solution can be implemented to ensure the smooth progress of product design.

34. What are the Essential Things to consider while making user Personas?

• User personas must be prepared with correct demographics and psychographics
• They must reflect user behavior accurately
• You can prepare multiple user personas if needed
• The feedback of potential users must be taken in the making of user personas
• User personas’ motivation must be incorporated perfectly.

35. What type of Prototype Iterations would you follow during your Design Process?

We can use low-fidelity prototypes at the initial stage of product tests. After that, we can use high-fidelity prototypes to test improved prototypes.

Most Common Product Design FAQs

1. What makes a Product Successful?

A Product must function as users expect, first of all. Another crucial thing is it must come with good quality. More to the point, a successful product must be inexpensive.

2. What is Product Design Specification?

A product design specification contains user requirements, how the product should function, information about the product development project, deadlines, budget details, testing methods, and many more.

3. What are the risks involved with a Product Design?

Improper planning, lack of coordination among teams, urgent deadlines, inadequate reviews, and defining inaccurate prototype results are a few risks associated with product design.

4. What is the difference between a Product Designer and an Industrial Designer?

A Product Designer makes a product design by completely understanding users' requirements. Also, they improve the existing products with additional features and capabilities. On the other hand, an industrial designer designs a product from the understanding of the manufacturing process. They aim to simplify the manufacturing process by creating effective designs and improving product quality.

5. What are the different KPIs associated with Product Design?

• Time to product release
• Success rate
• Failure rate
• Return rate

Tips to attend Product Design Interview

1. Do Neat Homework: Research thoroughly about the company that you are going to face in an interview. Know the type of projects that the company is working on. Learn about the company through websites, social media platforms, etc. If you talk about the projects and products of the company during the interview, it will definitely show your interest in the company to interviewers.
2. Design your Portfolio Carefully: As a product designer, your portfolio should reflect your creativity and your efforts to prepare them. Show all your previous records and achievements. If you are a beginner, show proof of the skills you have developed and the tools you are familiar with. As you know, one image is equal to a thousand words. Based on this truth you must prepare your portfolio with good visuals and information based on this truth.
3. Assume Questions: No wonder you can frame a few interview questions based on the company for which you will attend the interview. You can assume what skills and tools they could expect. Prepare questions and answers accordingly.
4. Stellar Presentation: Delivery is as important as preparation. Show enthusiasm and make a stellar presentation during the interview. Speak firmly and convey answers. Never miss communicating all your skills and expertise in tools to the interview team. Approach your interview positively and energetically.

Conclusion

Well! We hope that we have covered the key Product Design Interview Questions and Answers in this blog. Now, you can confidently face your product design interviews. Know that there are many opportunities for product designers at all levels of organizations in the job market. If you polish your product design skills by attending a course, it will open up many chances to getting placed in top companies. MindMajix offers a course on Product Design, that you can complete and achieve certification. It will help you as a key to open the door of chances in this competitive world.