If you have always understood other people’s problems; and relate to them in any way, it means you are empathetic. Have you ever thought of using this quality of yours as a potential feature of your job? If yes, then there are countless jobs out there that accompany such a magnificent characteristic. If you also have a creative side to you; you can incorporate both your empathetic and creative skills in one job, that is, Product Designing. Let us see about Product design interview questions.
Product Designing welcomes characteristics such as empathy, creativity, analysis, and goal orientation. If you are interested in becoming a Product Designer then; you need to look out for different companies, and the interview is processed to fulfill your dream job. In this article, we will be looking at how you can encompass all your characteristics and make sure you get the job of your dreams.
What is a Product Designer?
Before diving into how you can become a Product Designer, let us look at the roles you will be appending to.
A product designer is in charge of a product’s user experience, generally receiving direction from product management on corporate goals and objectives. Although product designers are frequently associated with the visual/tactile components of a product, they can also contribute to the product’s information architecture and system design.
While a product designer is always beneficial to a company, they play a particularly significant role at critical stages of the development process. During the early design and proof-of-concept phases, they may translate the product’s purpose into a practical user experience and provide necessary advice on what must be in place for users to fulfill their goals.
As a product evolves and adds new features and capabilities, it can provide an intuitive user experience and decrease areas of friction. And, after a product is mature, they may assist with refining the user experience and making the product more efficient to enhance page load rates, among other things.
Product designers get viewed as a luxury by certain firms, which may postpone hiring someone in that job until later in their lifecycle, but others may employ a product designer before hiring a product manager. Product design is also reasonably easy to outsource; thus, many businesses rely on outside consultants and agencies for this role.
What are the responsibilities of a Product Designer?
Let us now see the different responsibilities you will have when tackling being a Product Designer.
- Create design thoughts and sketches to help you decide on the ideal product.
- Present product concepts to appropriate team members for brainstorming.
- Product engineers should get advice on ways to enhance design and performance.
- Design thoughts should get translated into functioning prototypes.
- Conduct research on product technologies and structures to incorporate them into design concepts.
- Keep current industry developments and market circumstances in mind.
- Coordination with designers is essential to ensure proper communication and efficiency during the design phase.
- To satisfy consumer requirements, modify and alter current designs.
How Can You Become a Product Designer?
Increasing Your Knowledge of Different Tools
Your UI and UX sketching software, like any good tool, is an extension of you. Understanding your tools, whether they are Sketch, InVision, or something else, requires knowing where the buttons are and how to utilize them.
You must be able to put, pull, resize, export, crop, and delete objects. However, be prepared to employ shared styles and symbols. YouTube tutorials are a terrific place to start, as sitting next to a designer buddy and watching them work. It gets working as long as you are being more comfortable and proficient with a good sketching application.
Any great product designer possesses abilities signified by the letter “T.” The horizontal beginning at the top of the “T” will give you your broad awareness of the whole design spectrum. The extended vertical extension represents your specific emphasis or specialty, and not everyone works in the same industry.
Portfolio Building
Your portfolio demonstrates your abilities as a designer. An excellent portfolio should include numerous strong samples of your work as well as the phases in the process. To explain how you function, you should go over your workflow and methodologies for the projects in your portfolio. This enables interviewers to gauge how well you would fit in with their team and vice versa.
In particular, having an item in your portfolio that is relevant to the designer position you want to get recruited for might be beneficial during job interviews. Because a hiring manager may find it difficult to imagine your design talents and work applied to their products, prepare something for the interview based on anything in their product line or anything that would add value to their organization. That may be an interesting approach to distinguish yourself from other applicants and demonstrate to the employees at the organization how you can handle the job with ease.
Practice Your Skills
Learning should never be stopped. Every day, you should study design, explore tactics, gain new tools, and put what you currently know into practice.
Hands-on training is the best method to learn, especially in a profession like product design. So, if you get an idea, draw it! Take it as far as you can; it is the finest method to study without a job unless you get enrolled in a formal school program. Furthermore, because the design is a fast-evolving area, you will need to remain current on the latest technology relating to digital product design and visual design.
Find and solve an issue. Is there a new product you frequently use that you believe you can improve? Work your way through it and make a prototype. Get input from friends or design peers, and then revise your work. Continue to work on it, and you should see results.
Salary
In the United States, the average product designer income is $87,112 per year or $41.88 per hour. People on the lower end of the scale, the lowest 10%, earn roughly $57,000 per year, while the richest 10% make $131,000. As with most things, location is important. Product designer wages are best in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and California.
Interview Process for a Product Designer
The interview process for becoming a Product Designer for a specific company gets divided into three rounds.
These three rounds are:
Phone Interview
After your portfolio has been reviewed by the company; you will receive a 15–30-minute call from the recruiter to let you know whether your application has gotten approved. They also ask you to elaborate your resume, while giving you the requirements and needs of the job. They will try to get to know you more as a designer.
Video Call with Designers
After the phone interview, you will get asked to interview the designers of the company. This call can last up to a period of 45-minutes. In this interview, they will mainly focus on your resume and the skills you have as a designer. You may get asked some technical questions so that the interviewer knows how much knowledge you have in design.
Onsite Interview
Most of the final interviews get done onsite, but they can also be done online. This interview might be the longest out of the lot. In this interview; they will strictly assess your qualities and attributes as a designer. They will also look at your previous works to know what you are capable of. They will also ask you some behavioral questions. They might also conduct a small design test to get a knowledge of your skills in real life.
Interview Questions
To make it easy to assess the different types of questions asked at an interview for a Product Designer, we have divided the questions based on which interview they will get asked on.
Questions asked in the Phone Interview:
- Tell me about yourself and how you entered into UX design.
- Could you guide me through one of your projects?
- Why should you choose us?
- What are your hobbies?
- Do you have any queries for me?
- How do you analyze product designs using analytics tools and key performance indicators (KPIs)?
- What does the word “design thinking” mean to you as a person?
- What Are Your Strong Points?
- What Is Your Biggest Weakness?
- What are you passionate about?
Questions asked in the Interview with Designer:
- Tell me about yourself and how you got started in UX design.
- Would you be willing to give me a tour of one of your most notable projects?
- What do you want to gain from this position?
- What credentials are required to be a successful product designer?
- Have you ever been trained in product design?
- Do you regard yourself to be a high achiever, and why?
- How many years have you been in the product design business?
- Do you prefer working alone or in groups?
- Have you ever held a role in design leadership?
- What should you do if a client is dissatisfied with a design?
Questions asked in the Onsite Interview:
- Product design entails several processes, such as research, prototyping, visual design, and technological execution. One stage do you devote the most time to, and which do you consider your strongest?
- Reimagine and remodel a current digital product of your choice to demonstrate your talents and abilities as a designer in solving a tough challenge.
- Create a table that can display 1,000 parent devices. Each parent device may include up to 1,000 child devices. Create the table in such a way that you can filter and change each entry, as well as discover information for both parent and kid devices.
- How would you approach presenting a design to stakeholders but receive a lot of negative comments and resistance on your solution?
- What would be the one impediment or difficulty that you might imagine preventing you from meeting a deadline?
- You are a part of a product team, and another team member offers you a design suggestion. The concept fixes a short-term problem while creating a longer-term problem that is far more difficult to cope with. How do you react?
- Do you believe the modification was effective if the stats indicate an increase in clicks, but not in conversions? If so, why or why not?
- How would you assist an independent coffee shop owner that is going to close his doors in a month?
- Show us a few of your favorite items from your portfolio. How did you create this piece with creativity? What issues were you attempting to resolve? How did you arrive at a particular design decision?
- Explain how you put yourself in the shoes of the user. When you begin a new project, what research methods do you employ?
Conclusion
As a Product Designer, you will be tested on many of your skills such as: how you manage, converse, design, listen, fulfill duties. You will be entitled to listen to different people’s opinions; and come up with something that will please everyone, especially, the person to whom you are giving the product. Practicing is essential for becoming a Product Designer, and with more and, more practice you will be able to achieve greatness. You will also be able to tackle the interview process and questions easily also.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q.1. Do Product Designers need to code?
Ans: Knowing how to code is not necessary to become a Product Designer.
Q.2. Should I learn UX or UI first?
Ans: UX design is usually the initial step in the product development process, followed by UI. The UX designer maps out the user experience, which the UI designer subsequently fills in with visual and interactive elements.
Q.3. Do Product Designing require math?
Ans: In general, you do not need as much math as you do a solid grasp of materials, procedures, style, and function.
Q.4. What are the types of Product Design?
Ans: When it comes to Product Design, there are three main categories of design to consider: System Design, Process Design, and Interface Design.
Q.5. Is physics necessary for Product Designing?
Ans: Physics concepts should get reinforced with hands-on experiences. Physics expertise should get considered in product design projects, along with knowledge and abilities from other scientific and technological domains required in the project.