UX research interview discussion: the big questions

Hello again! First of all, I’d like to thank some folks for publishing/sharing my posts:

• Thanks to Bootcamp for publishing my meta-analysis of what not to do in UX Research Portfolios. [Bootcamp, 9/23]
• Thanks to Jan Ahrend for including the aforementioned meta-analysis post in the 9/28 edition of User Weekly, a weekly newsletter that rounds up a ton of great posts, videos, and audio from people in the world of UX research. Check it out! I’ll definitely be following it to get exposed to some great work by folks in User Research as well as be reminded of work from folks I already follow. [User Weekly, 9/28]

I Got a Job Interview!

I’m taking a break from writing about UX Research portfolios and developing my own portfolio because…good news! I was contacted to interview for a qualitative researcher position at a FAANG company. The first interview could be as early as next week, so I’m focusing on interview prep for now.

I’ve already read through the materials the company sent me, and I was told the interview would be a 45 minute conversation to gauge the depth and breadth of my research skills. So with that said, it’s time to focus on round 1 interview prep.

Today, I’ll be searching for tips on UX Research interviews. I looked through videos as well as articles for this round, and going forward I’ll be engaging more with the work of UX content creators on Youtube.

For this post, I’ll be listing some of the biggest frequently asked questions during user research job interviews. Then, I’ll summarize some of the advice given in answering each question. It’s somewhat tough to write about the big interview questions to expect because it all depends on the stage of the interview you’re in. There are often multiple rounds of an interview process, including:

• Initial recruiter screening(s)
• Conversation/interview with the hiring manager
• Interview with another UX researcher
• On-site interview with multiple people, including portfolio presentation

But hiring processes vary by company, so all I can do is focus on discussing what the hiring process for this job looks like

1. Recruiter screener
2. Personal Interview with Researcher <<- I am here
3. On-Site interview

The personal interview is primarily about the applicant’s background and research process. My interview will be a 45 minute interview with a researcher, so I’m preparing to answer questions about my professional background, career aspirations, research style, as well as technical questions. With that said, let’s get into some questions.

Archetype UXR Interview Questions

Sources I pulled this advice from:

• 5 Questions You’ll Be Asked In Your UX Research Job Interview (Career Foundry: Dec 9, 2019)
• UX Researcher Job Interview TIPS | How to Prepare for UX Recruiter Call & Hiring Manager part 1 (Kevin Liang: Nov 26, 2019)
• How I Prepared: UX Research Interview @ GOOGLE (Atira: Aug 31, 2020 — helpful resource links in the video description)
• Typical UX Researcher Interview Process and my Google interview experience (AonaTalks: Jan 04, 2021)

Tell me about yourself

This question isn’t really about the town you grew up in or your hobbies — you’re a professional, so it’s mainly about your career. You can begin with your professional history, drawing a path from where you started to where you are now, and then get into where you’re going. Talk about who you are professionally, what type of researcher you are, what your goals or next career steps are, and even what your philosophy is. This question can also gauge your passion for the role and the company.

What is your research process?

First of all, don’t try to answer this with a method-matching formula. Your research process shouldn’t only be matching methods to problems. Even if you get a research question that is about learning the user’s ideal information architecture, don’t just blurt out “CARD SORT!” and think you’ve “correctly” answered the question.

Also, be careful not to ramble. Of course, your way of solving a research question could go down a near-infinite number of rabbit holes, so you don’t want to verbally consider every possible solution and ramble on and on. Try to be as concise as possible, giving information about how you solve problems and how you understand the space you’re in.

Formulaic answer from career foundry: My first priority is to ___. After that, I need to ___. Depending on what I find out, I’ll either ____ or ____. When that’s done, I move on to _____. How you fill in those blanks is up to you.

How would you design a study for ____ ?

This question is gauging how you approach research projects and how you work within a team of stakeholders, team members, and users. In your answer, you should try to have a clear understanding of:

• How you estimate timelines for your research process
• When you choose qualitative methods over quantitative and vice versa
• Where you start when you’re working on a product: new products have different requirements than existing products.
• How you communicate with everyone involved in each aspect of the project.

Again, be careful not to ramble. Take this a step at a time, and focus on where you’d like to start, and then move on to the key turning points, decisions, collaborations, and contingencies.

How do you communicate with different people and roles? Or:

How do you communicate a specific topic or concept to a specific person or group? / How do you communicate your findings to different stakeholders? / How do you handle it when people are skeptical of the value of UX research? How do you sell the value of UX research to a product manager vs. a designer? How do you present a product or concept to a group of test users who might not understand it?

With these types of questions, the interviewer is assessing how you change your communication strategy to different audiences. It’s about testing how well you can determine the differences in needs between designers, engineers, stakeholders, and users. This is the chance to show you’re a professional at communication. This is also where improving your “soft” skills can come in handy.

Why do you want to work for this company? How would you improve on our product?

This requires doing some actual research on the company. Learn the company history, products, and culture. The best answers won’t involve glowing praise of the company and how much you love it — this is your time to be specific and actually think about why you want to work for the company. What problems are you hoping to help solve there? This is an opportunity to show that you will be an asset to the company, not just lucky to work there.

How many windows are in Los Angeles? [Or, any random question you’re unprepared for]

If and when you get a curveball question that you don’t immediately have a strong answer for, first: don’t panic. The specific content of this question matters less than the way you respond to it, so keeping your composure will help you formulate better off-the-cuff answers.

Career Foundry makes the following recommendations:

1. If the question is related to knowledge, skills or experiences: respond as reasonably as you can based on your experience but focus on walking the interviewer through your reasoning. Having the “right” answer matters less than having a great and clear problem-solving process. If you’ve got nothing, be honest about it. But talk them through how you’d find out the answer. You’re a researcher, after all.
2. If the question can lead to self-promotion: Don’t undersell yourself! Be confident. But obviously don’t sound arrogant.
3. If the question is impossible to answer: Admit you have no clue and tell them how you’d find out. Still, if the question is truly impossible for you to answer? Use the opportunity to build rapport with the interviewer, showcase your personality/skills/interests. Maybe even ask the interviewer for what they would answer. You can always learn something!

Walk me through a piece of research you’ve done.

Generally this should be easier because you should know your research. But some basic advice from Kevin Liang and Paula Desmond is: outline of the problem you were trying to solve, describe the team you worked with and who the stakeholders were, briefly walk through the important steps of your research process, and highlight the impact the research had.

Especially if you worked within a team, highlight what your role was and what value you brought. Basically, you need to have a good answer for describing what your research looks like, end-to-end.

Questions for you to ask

First of all, the most important thing is to just have meaningful questions ready to go. You should have questions. Not asking questions can signal a lack of preparedness or a lack of interest in the position. When in doubt, remember that you probably do have genuine questions about what working at the company will be like. Will your work be valued automatically by stakeholders, or will persuading others on the value of research be a core part of your work? Who will you be working with — designers, product managers, engineers? Some good questions to ask include:

• Why did you join the company?
• How long have you been with the company, and why have you stayed?
• What role does the research team play in the company? Who does the research team work with / report to? How do the stakeholders think or feel about research?
• How are product decisions made?
• I’m very interested to grow as a UX researcher — what are the opportunities for mentoring like in this role?

Throughout the Interview

Try to let your personality come across in your answers. Of course you want to convey that you can do the job, but you also want to convey that you’re a good person to work with.

Tomorrow: The Answers! Studying Mock UX Research Job Interviews

There was so much I wasn’t able to get into in this post, but really I’m just excited to get into some actual mock interviews tomorrow and start honing in on how I would answer these questions myself. I already have a lot of thoughts, but I want to sharpen my answers before sharing any. We’re getting to the good parts!

Thanks so much for reading — if you have any advice on UX research job interviews, drop a comment below!

Josh