Probability and Statistics Interview Questions

1. Explain what regularization is and why it is useful.
2. How would you validate a model you created to generate a predictive model of a quantitative outcome variable using multiple regression.
3. Explain what precision and recall are. How do they relate to the ROC curve?
4. How can you prove that one improvement you’ve brought to an algorithm is really an improvement over not doing anything?
5. What is root cause analysis?
6. Are you familiar with price optimization, price elasticity, inventory management, competitive intelligence? Give examples.
7. What is statistical power?
8. Explain what resampling methods are and why they are useful. Also explain their limitations.
9. Is it better to have too many false positives, or too many false negatives? Explain.
10. What is selection bias, why is it important and how can you avoid it?
11. Imagine a test with a true positive rate of 100% and false positive rate of 5%. Imagine a population with a 1/1000 rate of having the condition the test identifies. Given a positive test, what is the probability of having that condition?
12. What is the normal distribution? Give an example of some variable that follows this distribution.
13. What about log-normal?
14. Explain what a long tailed distribution is and provide three examples of relevant phenomena that have long tails. Why are they important in classification and prediction problems?
15. How to check if a distribution is close to Normal? Why would you want to check it? What is a QQ Plot?
16. Give examples of data that does not have a Gaussian distribution, or log-normal.
17. Do you know what the exponential family is?
18. Do you know the Dirichlet distribution? the multinomial distribution
19. What is the Laws of Large Numbers? Central Limit Theorem?
20. Why are they important for Statistics?
21. What summary statistics do you know?

Data Modeling Interview Questions

1. What are the most important skills for a data scientist to have?
2. What types of data are important for business needs?
3. What data would you go after and start working on?
4. What are the assumptions required for linear regression?
5. When you get a new data set, what do you do with it to see if it will suit your needs for a given project?
6. How do you handle big data sets?
7. How do you detect outliers?
8. How do you control model complexity?
9. How do you model a quantity you can’t observe?
10. You have one model and want to find the best set of parameters for this model. How would you do that?
11. How would you look for the best parameters? Do you know something else apart from grid search?
12. What is Cross-Validation?
13. What is 10-Fold CV?
14. What is the difference between holding out a validation set and doing 10-Fold CV?
15. How do you know if your model overfits?
16. How do you assess the results of a logistic regression?
17. Which evaluation metrics you know? Something apart from accuracy?
18. Which is better: Too many false positives or too many false negatives?
19. What precision and recall are?
20. What is a ROC curve? What is AU ROC (AUC)? How to interpret the curve and AU ROC?
21. Do you know about Concordance or Lift?

Data Science Process Interview Questions

1. How would you create a taxonomy to identify key customer trends in unstructured data?
2. Python or R — Which one would you prefer for text analytics?
3. Which technique is used to predict categorical responses?
4. What is logistic regression? Or State an example when you have used logistic regression recently.
5. What are Recommender Systems?
6. Why data cleaning plays a vital role in analysis?
7. Differentiate between univariate, bivariate and multivariate analysis.
8. What do you understand by the term Normal Distribution?
9. What is Linear Regression?
10. What is Interpolation and Extrapolation?
11. What is power analysis?
12. What is K-means? How can you select K for K-means?
13. What is Collaborative filtering?
14. What is the difference between Cluster and Systematic Sampling?
15. Are expected value and mean value different?
16. What does P-value signify about the statistical data?
17. Do gradient descent methods always converge to same point?
18. What are categorical variables?
19. How you can make data normal using Box-Cox transformation?
20. What is the difference between Supervised Learning an Unsupervised Learning?
21. Explain the use of Combinatorics in data science.
22. Why is vectorization considered a powerful method for optimizing numerical code?
23. What is the goal of A/B Testing?
24. What is an Eigenvalue and Eigenvector?
25. What is Singular Value Decomposition?
26. What is Gradient Descent?
27. How can outlier values be treated?
28. How can you assess a good logistic model?
29. How can you iterate over a list and also retrieve element indices at the same time?
30. During analysis, how do you treat missing values?
31. Explain about the box cox transformation in regression models.
32. Can you use machine learning for time series analysis?
33. Write a function that takes in two sorted lists and outputs a sorted list that is their union.
34. What is the difference between Bayesian Inference and Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE)?
35. What is Regularization and what kind of problems does regularization solve?
36. What is multicollinearity and how you can overcome it?
37. What is the curse of dimensionality?
38. How do you decide whether your linear regression model fits the data?
39. What is the difference between squared error and absolute error?
40. What is Machine Learning?
41. How are confidence intervals constructed and how will you interpret them?
42. How will you explain logistic regression to an economist, physician scientist and biologist?
43. How can you overcome Overfitting?
44. Differentiate between wide and tall data formats?
45. Is Naïve Bayes bad? If yes, under what aspects.
46. How would you develop a model to identify plagiarism?
47. Can you outline the steps in an analytics project?
48. Have you heard of CRISP-DM (Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining)?

Data Science Machine Learning Interview Questions

1. What is your favorite ML algorithm and why?
2. Describe the regression problem. Is it supervised learning? Why?
3. What is linear regression? Why is it called linear?
4. Discuss the bias-variance tradeoff.
5. What is Ordinary Least Squares Regression? How it can be learned?
6. Can you derive the OLS Regression formula? (For one-step solution)
7. Do we always need the intercept term? When do we need it and when do we not?
8. What is collinearity and what to do with it? How to remove multicollinearity?
9. What if the design matrix is not full rank?
10. What is overfitting a regression model? What are ways to avoid it?
11. What is Ridge Regression? How is it different from OLS Regression? Why do we need it?
12. What is Lasso regression? How is it different from OLS and Ridge?
13. What are the assumptions required for linear regression?
14. You would like to find significant features. How would you do that?
15. You fit a multiple regression to examine the effect of a particular feature. The feature comes back insignificant, but you believe it is significant. Why can it happen?
16. How to check is the regression model fits the data well?
17. Can you describe what is the classification problem?
18. What is the simplest classification algorithm?
19. What classification algorithms do you know? Which one you like the most?What is a decision tree?
20. What are some business reasons you might want to use a decision tree model?
21. How do you build it?
22. What impurity measures do you know?
23. Describe some of the different splitting rules used by different decision tree algorithms.
24. Is a big brushy tree always good? Why would you want to prune it?
25. Is it a good idea to combine multiple trees?
26. What is Random Forest? Why is it good?
27. What is logistic regression?
28. How do we train a logistic regression model?
29. How do we interpret its coefficients?
30. What is an Artificial Neural Network?
31. How to train an ANN? What is back propagation?
32. How does a neural network with three layers (one input layer, one inner layer and one output layer) compare to a logistic regression?
33. What is deep learning? What is CNN (Convolution Neural Network) or RNN (Recurrent Neural Network)?
34. What is Regularization?
35. Which problem does Regularization try to solve?
36. What does it mean (practically) for a design matrix to be “ill-conditioned”?
37. When might you want to use ridge regression instead of traditional linear regression?
38. What is the difference between the L1 and L2 regularization?
39. Why (geometrically) does LASSO produce solutions with zero-valued coefficients (as opposed to ridge)?
40. What is the purpose of dimensionality reduction and why do we need it?
41. Are dimensionality reduction techniques supervised or not? Are all of them are (un)supervised?
42. What ways of reducing dimensionality do you know?
43. Is feature selection a dimensionality reduction technique?
44. What is the difference between feature selection and feature extraction?
45. Is it beneficial to perform dimensionality reduction before fitting an SVM? Why or why not?
46. What is Principal Component Analysis (PCA)? What is the problem it solves? How is it related to eigenvalue decomposition (EVD)?
47. What’s the relationship between PCA and SVD? When SVD is better than EVD for PCA?
48. Under what conditions is PCA effective?
49. Why do we need to center data for PCA and what can happed if we don’t do it? Do we need to scale data for PCA?
50. Is PCA a linear model or not? Why?
51. Do you know other Dimensionality Reduction techniques?
52. What is Independent Component Analysis (ICA)? What’s the difference between ICA and PCA?
53. Suppose you have a very sparse matrix where rows are highly dimensional. You project these rows on a random vector of relatively small dimensionality. Is it a valid dimensionality reduction technique or not?
54. Have you heard of Kernel PCA or other non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques? What about LLE (Locally Linear Embedding) or tt-SNE (tt-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding)
55. What is Fisher Discriminant Analysis? How it is different from PCA? Is it supervised or not?
56. What is the difference between a convex function and non-convex?
57. What is Gradient Descent Method?
58. Will Gradient Descent methods always converge to the same point?
59. What is a local optimum?
60. Is it always bad to have local optima?
61. What the Newton’s method is?
62. What kind of problems are well suited for Newton’s method? BFGS? SGD?
63. What are “slack variables”?
64. Describe a constrained optimization problem and how you would tackle it.
65. What is NLP? How is it related to Machine Learning?
66. How would you turn unstructured text data into structured data usable for ML models?
67. What is the Vector Space Model?
68. What is TF-IDF?
69. Which distances and similarity measures can we use to compare documents? What is cosine similarity?
70. Why do we remove stop words? When do we not remove them?
71. Language Models. What is NN-Grams?
72. What is Curse of Dimensionality? How does it affect distance and similarity measures?
73. What are the problems of large feature space? How does it affect different models, e.g. OLS? What about computational complexity?
74. What dimensionality reductions can be used for preprocessing the data?
75. What is the difference between density-sparse data and dimensionally-sparse data?

Data Science Culture Fit Interview Questions

1. Which is your favorite machine learning algorithm and why?
2. In which libraries for Data Science in Python and R, does your strength lie?
3. What kind of data is important for specific business requirements and how, as a data scientist will you go about collecting that data?
4. Tell us about the biggest data set you have processed till date and for what kind of analysis.
5. Which data scientists you admire the most and why?
6. Suppose you are given a data set, what will you do with it to find out if it suits the business needs of your project or not.
7. What were the business outcomes or decisions for the projects you worked on?
8. What unique skills you think can you add on to our data science team?
9. Which are your favorite data science startups?
10. Why do you want to pursue a career in data science?
11. What have you done to upgrade your skills in analytics?
12. What has been the most useful business insight or development you have found?
13. How will you explain an A/B test to an engineer who does not know statistics?
14. When does parallelism helps your algorithms run faster and when does it make them run slower?
15. How can you ensure that you don’t analyse something that ends up producing meaningless results?
16. How would you explain to the senior management in your organization as to why a particular data set is important?
17. Is more data always better?
18. What are your favorite imputation techniques to handle missing data?
19. What are your favorite data visualization tools?

Digital Marketing and SEO Interview Questions

1. What is digital marketing?
2. How would you categorize digital marketing?
3. What is SEO?
4. What is a keyword in digital marketing? How important is it from the point of SEO?
5. What are the key areas where you can use keywords to optimize the site ranking?
6. What is PPC or Pay Per Click advertising?
7. What are the primary models for determining Pay-Per-Click?
8. What is Google Adwords?
9. What is an effective PPC keyword?
10. What are the key elements to optimize the conversion rates per PPC?
11. What should be the approach for effective Pay Per Click campaigns?
12. What is on-page and off page optimization?
13. What are the characteristics of “bad links”?
14. What is Inbound Marketing?
15. What are some of your favorite inbound marketing tools?
16. How does a “link building” campaign work?
17. What’s the difference between ‘On Page’ and ‘Off Page’ optimization?
18. Tell me about the latest Google algorithm changes.
19. What are 3 factors that influence the ranking of a page?
20. Are you familiar with SEM? What SEM tools have you used?
21. Has marketing been affected by Big Data? How?
22. What do you do to stay up to date with new marketing techniques?
23. What recently-developed marketing strategy, technique or tool interests you the most right now?

Social Media Marketing Interview Questions

1. Why should a company or brand have a social media page?
2. In your opinion, which social network fits our company best?
3. How do you use social media as a tool for customer service?
4. What are the first steps you take when handling a social media crisis?
5. What are your thoughts on moderating comments?
6. How does social media affect SEO and your online profile?
7. What piece of content were you involved in creating that received high exposure from social media channels like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn
8. Did you optimize this content yourself or did you leverage a team member familiar with social media marketing?
9. Tell me about a piece of content you edited and how you strengthened that piece of content?
10. What are the benefits of platforms such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck, etc?
11. What are the benefits of a LinkedIn group vs. LinkedIn page?
12. How could you leverage YouTube in order to promote our brand and increase engagement?
13. Which social media platforms are you best at using and why?
14. What is a limitation you have experienced on a social media platform? How did you overcome this?
15. Which social media experts and/or influencers do you follow?
16. What kinds of skills/qualities do you think you need to possess to be a community manager?
17. Are there any up-and-coming social media platforms we should watch out for?
18. What are some of the best practices on Twitter?
19. What is your opinion on Google+? How should it be used in social media strategy?
20. What are our competitors doing on social media?

Content Marketing & Metrics Interview Questions

1. What makes content “successful”?
2. How do you create a blog post?
3. What content marketing blogs do you read?
4. How does Google rank content?
5. What are some good ways to get other people to link to your content?
6. What are some effective call-to-action techniques?
7. What kind of system or method are you currently using for reporting progress on your work?
8. In your opinion, what are the most important KPIs?
9. How well do you manage Google Analytics?
10. Explain what a conversion rate is.
11. What are these terms — CPM, CTR and PPC?
12. How do you measure social return on investment (ROI)?
13. What do you know about our target market?
14. How do you generate your marketing plans?
15. What do you use to find out if your marketing plan is working?
16. What marketing strategies do you consider most successful for our product?
17. How and when do you evaluate your marketing campaigns?
18. What do you consider the 5 most important aspects of successful marketing?
19. Describe a marketing strategy that failed.
20. Do you subscribe to a particular marketing belief or methodology
21. How do you prefer to distribute and manage information?

Commercial Marketing Scenario Interview Questions

1. You are working at an independent search marketing consultancy and begin working with a client who believes they have been penalized. How would you diagnose the problem and what corrective action might you reasonably expect to take?
2. You are working for a major hotel chain as a PPC manager and you’ve been asked to explore expanding your campaign to target American customers looking to book hotels in the UK. What would you need to know to forecast whether this campaign would be profitable?
3. You work brand-side for a high street fashion retailer. You’ve been given the responsibility for producing content to drive both social and SEO objectives. You have been given a total content budget of £75,000. How would you decide how to spend this money? Also draw up a provisional allocation of resources.
4. How would you pitch innovative and new approaches to both paid and natural search campaigns?
5. You’re working in-house at a travel company that is fourth place for market share in your sector. What strategic approach would you take in paid search to increase market share?
6. We’re launching a new product in 3 months with (these characteristics). Tell me some of your ideas for the launch.
7. What do you think about our blog?
8. Take a look at these 2 different designs for our new website, which one is better? Why?
9. Create a 1 month content calendar that includes different types of content ranging from videos, ebooks, blog posts to podcasts and social media.
10. What are your first thoughts about this specific graphic/plan and how would you improve it?
11. You’ve just picked up a call from a customer who claims to have not received his shipment, even though UPS confirms it was delivered. What do you do?
12. A customer has just posted a negative review to the company’s Facebook page and you’re in charge of responding. How do you handle it?
13. An SEO technique you’ve used successfully in the past has just been devalued by Google. What do you do next?
14. You’ve been tasked with redesigning the company’s brand strategy from the ground up. Walk me through your process.
15. You’ve been put in charge of planning the company’s nationwide conference. Where do you begin?
16. One of your employees has just accidentally posted a personal tweet to the company’s account. How will you handle her?

Marketing Culture Fit Interview Questions

1. What have you done to contribute toward a teamwork environment?
2. What do you consider your most significant strength as a digital marketing professional?
3. What kinds of situations do you find most stressful?
4. What is more important to you: the money or the work?
5. Describe a time you were faced with stress that tested your coping skills.
6. How would you define success for someone in your chosen career?
7. Describe the most difficult scheduling problem you have faced at work.
8. Do you prefer to work in a small, medium or large company?
9. How long do you expect to remain employed with us?
10. How would you decide on your online marketing objectives?
11. Tell me about how you worked effectively under pressure.
12. Give me an example when you felt you were able to motivate a group?
13. How important do you feel it is to communicate with the sales team?
14. How would you market our products if you were put on a severely limited budget?

SEE ALSO: Marketing Interview Questions & Answers

Product Manager Technical Background Interview Questions

1. Why did you decide to move from engineering to product management?
2. What is the biggest advantage of having a technical background?
3. What is the biggest disadvantage?
4. What was the biggest lesson you learned when you moved from engineering to product management?
5. What do you wish you’d known when you were an engineer?
6. How do you earn the respect of the engineering team?

Product Manager Design Interview Questions

1. Tell me about your product design process and experience?
2. Have you worked with UX/UI Designers and how so?
3. A product is ready to ship, but the UX Designer doesn’t approve of shipping because of an UX issue, what do you do?
4. How do you know when a design is “done”?
5. Analyze the UX/UI of our product, how would you improve it?
6. What are pitfalls of being too reliant on hard data in product design?

Product Manager Operations Interview Questions

1. What software development methods have you used?
2. How did you work with your engineers in your current or previous role?
3. What’s a cool innovative technology or product that you’ve seen recently and why?
4. What do you want to build here and why?
5. Tell me about that time when you’ve hit a sticking point with your engineering team. What was it and how did you work through it
6. Where do you think the industry is going? Is it ripe for disruption?
7. What’s the competitive landscape and revenue model? What’s the value chain?
8. Can the company position itself for success and what does that mean for the product?
9. We’re thinking about expanding into XYZ business, should we?Tell me about a great product you’ve encountered recently. Why do you like it? [By the way, it drives me crazy when candidates name one of my products in an interview. I had a hard time hiring anybody at Yahoo! who told me the coolest product they’d come across recently was Yahoo! Good grief.]
10. What made our product successful?
11. What do you dislike about my product? How would you improve it?
12. What problems are we going to encounter in a year? Two years? Ten years?
13. How do you know a product is well designed?
14. What’s one of the best ideas you’ve ever had?
15. What is one of the worst?
16. How do you know when to cut corners to get a product out the door?
17. What lessons have you learned about user interface design?
18. How do you decide what not to build?
19. What was your biggest product mistake?
20. What aspects of product management do you find the least interesting and why?
21. Do you consider yourself creative?

Product Manager Metrics/Pricing Interview Questions

1. When have you used massive amounts of data to drive a decision?
2. How would you price a product of ours?
3. Your sales and marketing team came to you with a feature request, build it and a deal gets done, what do you do?
4. Tell me about a business or product metric that you were responsible for and how you went about attaining it.
5. How would you determine the price for piece of wearable technology?

Product Manager Strategy Interview Questions

1. What is the most efficient way to sort a million integers?
2. How would you build a website for blind people?
3. How would you re-position a company’s offerings to counteract competitive threats?
4. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
5. How many bottles of shampoo are produced in the world a year?
6. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
7. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
8. How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?
9. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
10. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
11. You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?
12. Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
13. You have 15 horses that run various speeds. You own a race track on which you can race the horses, and this track holds a maximum of 5 horses per race. If you have no stopwatch or other means of telling exactly how fast the horses are, how many races would you need to run between the horses to be ABSOLUTELY SURE which horses are first, second, and third fastest?
14. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?
15. In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
16. If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?
17. If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands? (The answer to this is not zero!)
18. Four people need to cross a rickety rope bridge to get back to their camp at night. Unfortunately, they only have one flashlight and it only has enough light left for seventeen minutes. The bridge is too dangerous to cross without a flashlight, and it’s only strong enough to support two people at any given time. Each of the campers walks at a different speed. One can cross the bridge in 1 minute, another in 2 minutes, the third in 5 minutes, and the slow poke takes 10 minutes to cross. How do the campers make it across in 17 minutes?
19. You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?
20. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
21. You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?
22. You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)
23. You are given 2 eggs. You have access to a 100-story building. Eggs can be very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.
24. Describe a technical problem you had and how you solved it.
25. How would you design a simple search engine?
26. Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco.
27. There’s a latency problem in South Africa. Diagnose it.
28. What are three long term challenges facing Google?
29. Name three non-Google websites that you visit often and like. What do you like about the user interface and design? Choose one of the three sites and comment on what new feature or project you would work on. How would you design it?
30. If there is only one elevator in the building, how would you change the design? How about if there are only two elevators in the building?
31. How many vacuum’s are made per year in USA?

Product Manager Leadership Questions

1. Is consensus always a good thing?
2. What’s the difference between management and leadership?
3. What kinds of people do you like to work with?
4. What types of people have you found it difficult to work with?
5. Tell me about a time when a team didn’t gel. Why do you think that happened, and what have you learned?
6. How do you get a team to commit to a schedule?
7. What would somebody do to lose your confidence?
8. Do you manage people from different functions differently? If so, how?
9. What have you learned about saying no?
10. Who has the ultimate accountability for shipping a product?
11. Have you ever been in a situation where your team has let you down and you’ve had to take the blame?
12. How has your tolerance for mistakes changed over the years?
13. Which do you like first, the good news or the bad news?
14. What’s your approach to hiring?
15. How have you learned to work with sales?
16. What is the best way to interface with customers?
17. What makes marketing tick?
18. How do you know when design is on the right track?
19. How should a product manager support business development?
20. What have you learned about managing up?
21. What’s the best way to work with the executives?

SEE ALSO: Product Manager Interview Questions & Answers

UX Design Process Interview Questions

1. How do you define UX design?
2. What is your design process? Describe what methods you follow?
3. What is visual hierarchy?
4. Can you speak to the difference between information architecture, interaction design, usability and user research?
5. How do you get into the mindset of a user and anticipate their needs and actions?
6. Describe to us a basic user experience process. Would that process be different depending on the type of project, for instance responsive website versus mobile app?
7. How do you know that what you’re designing works for the user? Tell us a bit about personas and your approach to research and incorporating research in your work?
8. What are the basic philosophies or principles that inform your designs
9. How do you incorporate usability into the design and testing process?
10. How do you balance business needs and technical restrictions with good design?
11. Do you have a technical/data-influenced background?
12. What tools and applications do you use?
13. What is the most important thing on a page/wireframe? Why?
14. Do you specialize in wireframing and functionality design, or graphic design? Which do you prefer?
15. When an engineer says, “Hey, I don’t like this design”, what do you do?
16. What are the advantages and disadvantages of following a web style guide?
17. Can you explain the process behind each (or a specific) design piece in your portfolio? What research or testing did you do to validate your design decision?
18. What are your favorite apps? Why?
19. What is your approach to making websites and platforms accessible to all user groups, including users with visual, hearing, and motor disabilities?
20. What would you say will be the next big trend in the UX Design industry?
21. What design trend can you not stand? Why?

UX Research Process Interview Questions

1. What attracts you to research?
2. What is your experience with qualitative research methods? (ethnography, focus groups/group discussions, one-on-one interviewing, contextual inquiry, observational research, etc.)
3. Since your experience is primarily in qualitative methods, how do you feel about quantitative research?
4. What skill do you possess that you think you do better than 99.9% of the entire population?
5. What do you excel at (your superpower) and what can you improve on (your kryptonite)?
6. What is your research process?
7. How do you choose which method(s) you’re going to use for particular projects?
8. Which methods and approaches do you think are the most useful or effective?
9. What is the value of doing contextual research over facility-based research (e.g., focus groups, interviews)?
10. How do you incorporate theory into your research?
11. What are your favorite social science theories?
12. How do you approach qualitative data analysis?
13. What tools do you typically use for analysis? (e.g., affinity mapping, coding, Excel, etc.)
14. How do you analyze ethnographic data?
15. Have you used any qualitative data analysis software?
16. At what point in the design process should user experience come into play?
17. Talk about a time when you had to change your plan or approach.
18. Our company hires heavily from our own user base. How would you balance the perspectives of internal users versus external users?
19. What is your experience working in Agile environments?
20. Have you ever used a Lean approach in your research?
21. How do you visualize data?
22. How do you visualize results for designers and developers?
23. Give me an example of a project you worked on for which you had to translate research data into insights.
24. Do you have experience with videography or video deliverables?
25. How would you sell the value of User Experience research to a VP of Product versus a VP of engineering?

UX Technical Skills Interview Questions

1. Show me a design example where you set out to solve a business problem.
2. How do you balance design aesthetic with revenue-generating activities on a website?
3. How do you balance the goals of the end user with those of the business.
4. What kind of data have you used to validate a design?
5. Have you created personas before? How did they help you?
6. Do you have any experience with e-commerce?
7. Do you have experience with mobile software or hardware?
8. What is your experience working with web analytics?
9. How would you do a competitive analysis of two websites?
10. How would you measure the success of a launched product?
11. What would you consider a UX Design failure on the newly launched project?
12. What questions do you need answered before you start designing an experience?
13. How do you estimate the timeline of your own design process?
14. You’re under a tight deadline and not all features in the project scope can be met in time. How would you decide which features to keep and which to cut?
15. What is a recent project that you were challenged by, and tell us how you approached the problem?
16. You want to redesign some part of a website but the client says they don’t want to spend the time or money to make the changes. What would you say?
17. How do you stay current on UX innovations?
18. Given a situation where there’s not enough time to research, what do you do?
19. What would you do differently if you had more time for research?
20. What is an instance where you delivered something exceptional, made you really proud of the result?

UX Commercial Application Interview Questions

1. How would you design an interface for an elevator in a 1000-floor building?
2. How would you design an ATM?
3. How would you design a microwave?
4. Can you estimate how many traffic lights there are in the United States?
5. Imagine we’re designing a kiosk at a transit stop. Its purpose is to let regular commuters refill their transit cards. We have an engineer coming in 20 minutes and he needs a spec. How would you explain how the kiosks works in that time? Solution
6. How would you describe the Internet to someone who just woke up from a 30-year coma? Solution
7. What are the advantages and disadvantages of contextual inquiry/field studies when designing an application or website?
8. How would you walk me through a brief analysis of our home page?
9. What is an example of a site you think has bad user experience? Why?
10. What are 3 examples of online products that have a great user experience?
11. If you had the power to change one feature for a website or application, what would you change?
12. What do you think makes a great UX designer vs. an average one? What makes you a great UX designer?
13. What are your thoughts on designing the user experience of a startup vs. a more established brand?
14. Are you familiar with the idea of a minimum viable product (MVP)?
15. Is UX only for huge agencies and global brands or can the little guys & gals get involved?
16. Why should business owners and/or marketing people care about UX?
17. Now let’s say that after 6 months, there is no jump in sales. What is at fault? Normally, sales and/or marketing gets blamed for having the wrong message, appealing to the wrong audience, not enough of this, too much of that. What if the reason for flat-lined sales had to do with user experience?
18. What’s the best way for UX and Marketing teams to work together
19. What’s the downside to omitting UX from the discussion?
20. Does your UX end once the website or app launch?
21. Is UX work expensive?
22. Does it make sense when people say something like “Looking for a UI/UX designer”?

UX Culture Fit Interview Questions

1. How do you advocate for usability in your organization?
2. What would be the most difficult personality for a coworker to have? How would you deal with this?
3. What would be the most difficult type of client to work with? How would you deal with this?
4. Have you ever faced a situation in which your feedback/recommendation was not taken? How did you handle the situation?
5. How do you form positive relationships with teammates or stakeholders?
6. How do you work with others?
7. What best practices do you use when working with engineers?
8. How do you approach working with designers?
9. How do you approach working with developers?
10. How have you provided guidance to your clients in the scoping of projects?
11. How do you deal with stakeholders (e.g., marketers) with really strong perspectives?
12. What do you do when a stakeholder disagrees with the results of your research?
13. What is your experience working with people who are unfamiliar with User-Centered Design?
14. Have you played more of a lead or support role on projects?
15. What phases of research were you most often involved with?
16. Have you worked with recruiters?
17. What is your experience with project management?
18. What is your experience with project scoping?
19. Have you managed external research vendors?
20. What is your ideal work day as a UX designer?
21. Where do you see yourself in 5–10 years?
22. How have you previously worked with product managers and engineers?
23. What are you looking for when it comes to a workplace?
24. How do you feel about working for a small agency versus a large corporation?
25. Can you describe a time when the requirements changed in the middle of a project, and how you handled that?
26. What’s your biggest pet peeve when engaging on a UX project?
27. Have you worked in a Lean or Agile process before? How so?
28. Do you have a side project you’d like to talk to us about?
29. What books/exhibitions/conferences or communities do you attend or admire?
30. Where do you go for inspiration?
31. How do you keep on top of current design trends?

Do your Homework

Don’t scramble to figure out what kind of questions to ask at the end of the interview. Ask two or three questions concerning something you can’t research on your own.