Kelley - Interview Questions
Describe a time when there was ambiguity. How did you overcome it?
- Admin: less visibility into stakeholder needs; started conversations to define user problems and goals - Project prioritization: brought feedback to upper mgmt and product team to establish KPIs at the department level, metrics for success in order to decide in which direction to move the project, what features to include, and create hypotheses of impact on the business
In UX, you need to meet business goals and that sacrifices the users' needs. How did you work with this?
- Balancing generative and evaluative research
Why did you leave Clutter?
- Company restructuring - Did not have a head of design or department - Came in as a junior designer, but they were expecting a senior to manage design processes, create inter-departmental relationships while shipping products, product manager - Tried to be both, and I learned how to work in fast paced environment, be well-rounded in entire product process
What's your experience like working with other designers and people?
- Designers: I've worked with other designers through meetups, colleagues, and conferences (IDEO, General Assembly, Figma, Dribbble) in the ideation phase where we're given a prompt and brainstorm solutions - Giving positive feedback and asking clarifying questions when there were gaps in knowledge or presentation - Communicating with others to gather deliverables, intelligence, through project management software, email or Slack; sending reminders and checking in
How do you communicate with stakeholders?
- Determine what information needs to be gathered, then decide whether this could be a message, email, or need to be discussed in a meeting - Create clear concise questions, thoughts or action items with relevant date, people or projects - Write questions, gather thoughts before meeting with stakeholders to prepare the meeting and set an agenda - Set the purpose of the meeting and come out with actionable items for relevant stakeholders after the meeting - What helps me communicate with stakeholders is understanding their over-arching goals and needs as a group or department - What is their involvement in the project or meeting, what did they come here to learn more about or contribute - To communicate my goals as a designer, making sure that I paint a vivid and real picture of what the user needs are in this context, their motivations
Is there a particular part of the design process that you like?
- Discover: where we can dive into research for a specific niche, exploring competitors, current market, and UX audits for relevant products; interested in seeing best practices, strengths, and weaknesses of other products out there (staying relevant); generative research methods to explore the problem space and evaluative research to validate ideas and to get the design right - Ideation: going wide with ideas, exploring how might we statements, no judgment zone for design iterations before getting into high-fidelity versions
Is there anything from your recent role that was particularly insightful or changed your thinking?
- Experiencing rapid growth in current role that I am particularly grateful to be a part of - Understanding the importance of company values aligning with individual contributors of the company - Being unattached to designs because they may or may not be used; being aware of the go when it appears in conversation; circumstance and patience are huge factors when experiencing inconsistency or instability at a company - Attachment to work requires patience and circumstance; that matching with a company also means matching with people who have similar values and understanding of outlook, goals - Unafraid of experiences that I'm going to come across such as design challenges, portfolio reviews, because I am not attached to the feedback, the results; there can only be positive things that come out of it because I'm learning - Better is better
Tell me about yourself
- Graduated from UCLA with a B.S. in Cognitive Science, deliberately choosing to study human perception, behavior, and psychology - Broke into UX and design by redesigning SoundCloud for iOS and publishing the study to Medium - Clutter: is a premiere physical storage company offers convenience by moving and storing belongings as a luxury service - Clutter: fast paced, quickly changing environment, Series C, rapidly hiring; worked on 3 projects simultaneously (web and iOS) while onboarding - Experienced product lifecycle, fail-fast and learn fast, and strong engineering culture - Sketchy: edtech company using narrative storytelling in combination with brain's memorization power to help students in professional health excel - Sketchy: leading Product Design by implementing design process, pattern library, conducting user research through focus groups, interviews, and testing; recently secured Series A funding with TCG - Learned to be well-rounded in process, wear many hats, be independent, advocate for design - I know I can adapt to niche problem spaces - Interested in solve complex problems, new challenges alongside a highly collaborative team - Interested in developing tools to empower individuals
Tell me about a conflict you had with another designer, how did you handle it?
- If it's a decision on a design, hear their explanation and ask if they had any other explorations or considerations, and what user need they are solving for - I have not had a conflict with another designer before, if I were to run into an issue, take the approach of having no ego, staying calm, and not taking anything personally - If it's a situation that is out of my hands, I would talk to my product design manager about the situation to advise on next steps, how to de-escalate, and to practice non-violent communication
What is your design process?
- Investigate as much as possible from relevant stakeholders, desk research, market and UX audits to see what's working and what's not working - Generative research to understand end users, gather raw observations and consolidate into findings and insights - Identify major user problems/themes from findings/insights and create broad solutions that are not interface specific - Jobs to be done, requirements with PM, sketches to generate as many solutions as possible then narrowed down to what will effectively solve user problems or meet their goals - Review the solutions with the PM and the engineer to get a sense of viability, rough time estimation, and united vision next steps - Scale back designs, revise, and create high-fidelity versions of solution with flows and prototypes - Test solutions and iterate on solutions through user feedback
What are you looking for in your next role?
- Looking to hone-in on design skills - Solve complex problems, new challenges alongside a highly collaborative team - Company that values design and exemplifies design leadership
What would your peers say about you?
- Patient, kind, considerate, empathetic, detailed, thorough, talented, cooperative, team player, resilient, honest, understanding and easy-going
What do you do to convince stakeholders?
- Presentation with consolidated findings, insights, targeted at goals of stakeholders - Understand their business needs and departmental needs and address them - Be aware of those goals and collect data around relevant goals to illustrate story about user behavior; create consistent reports and data tracking - Show generative and evaluative research results and actionable insights/feedback about possible solution - Get user feedback, metrics, data analyst involved to cross reference and point out business impact and impact on users
The PM wanted the design to go a certain way that you thought wasn't right. How did you defend your rationale?
- Review psychology of the UI pattern and what contexts they're used in, research through NN and observing patterns in direct competitors - If the design decision is detrimental to the system, requires more effort on design and engineering to create a new component, see if there's a different solution that solves for the same problem - Consider time, intuition, delight, and refer back to design principles that drive interface styling - Quickly prototyping and having PM play with experience to illustrate the points I'm making
What's your experience like working with developers?
- Sketchy: interfacing with engineers everyday; hopping on calls to walk through design specs; attaching assets to Jira tickets for design and engineering; using user and screen flows to explain functionality; providing a style guide; reviewing their work on staging and providing actionable feedback
What is your team like?
- Small, tight-knit, kind, patient, understanding, communicative, honest - Open to constructive feedback, asking opinions, and thoughts from engineering, product, or design
What are some of your favorite apps, and why?
- Spotify: invisible design through ML, AI; music curation and feed is accurate to individual taste; content development such as playlists, podcast, trends, and use of data in marketing - Apple Watch: Fitness app social interaction by commenting on workouts, encouraging healthy competition, and providing variety of workouts to log - Google Maps because the order of operations is linear and also follows the eye-movement from top left down to the bottom right; use of screen overlays and interactivity of the map as it relates to trackpads or mouse movement; truly aggregates relevant links, surfaces useful information, organization of metadata, planning ahead - Figma - I use it everyday and the shortcuts, low learning curve, and evolution of being a digital, publication editor (following Photoshop, Illustrator) I have no cognitive load when I'm designing and it truly increases the speed of my workflow
What does UX / Design / Product Design mean to you?
- To me, UX is a mirror for human behavior, psychology, sociology, ethnography, culture, economics - Provides a unique perspective on who we are as individuals and who we are as a society because we are creating solutions to problems particular to groups of people, communities - What we create through UX, design or product design is a statement about human behavior and activity - Design is a creative response to a human need aiming to provide a solution to that need; UX is how intuitive and seamless a user experience can be; Product Design is practical, creative problem solving for both business and users/people
What's your biggest weakness?
- Too empathetic and feeling too much for end users; generally creating solutions that will solve majority of problems because I pay attention to edge cases and details
Was there every a time where there was a conflict of interest? How did you overcome that?
- User research at Sketchy to gather feedback on new course release for internal medicine - Talking to upper mgmt to convince them to allot time towards interviews - Initially upper mgmt was hesitant and resistant; they believed that they had nothing else to learn from users - They already went through medical school and felt that they knew best, happy with product market fit - I continued to conduct surveys and interviews even though they were skeptical of the findings, impact - Generally ignored feedback, but I continued collect data from GA and user research - Shown upper mgmt there is useful data when gathered over time because we have actionable insights to work off of - Examples of whenever a stakeholder requests a design change, I ask questions about what they're trying to solve for - Get to the why of what they're proposing - what is the human need that we're trying to get at and advocating for the user - For the release of SketchyMedical iOS, the project had been in development for about 12 mos before I joined - Designers and engineers found that requirements and functionality would change at the whim of the co-founders, which pushed back release date as it added more development time - Myself and the lead engineer made a case to the co-founders by reflecting on the timeline, the number of changes, and the uncertainty of the release date due to the changes - Talked about benefits of releasing with a solid core feature instead of multiple not so great features
Tell me about Sketchy and some recent projects
About: - Sketchy is an education tech company that uses narrative storytelling and technology to help students memorize and learn material more effectively. - We are the standard for medical education and are among the top 3 resources medical school faculty and staff recommend, if not buy, for their students to use. - Raised $30m Series A in partnership with TCG to continue producing content for education and building out the software team Sidebar: - MS1, 2 of medical school is about mastering foundational knowledge, MS3 ,4 of medical school is about applying that foundational knowledge when you're in the hospital - Sketchy has only made videos based on year 1 and 2 of medical school; we were about to release material for the year 3 and 4 we anticipated that how students learn material would be different - Transition from memorization to application - Our videos have symbols where students memorize facts, symptoms, measurements that indicate diseases - Missing important framework for MS3, 4 - how students organize what they memorize about a disease in order to treat a patient - To account for this new knowledge, we created an outline that organized the memorized information into the perspective of application Search: - Most requested feature by students and users - Conducted focus group research to create discussion around what information students are searching for when using Sketchy and other products - Gain perspective around how medical students search for info (papers, textbooks, websites, drugs, diseases, viruses, microbes) - Synthesizing findings and altered direction of low-fidelity wireframes by inquiring about user journey and needs when searching
Tell me how you got into UX/Design
Short: - What got me into UX/Design was when I redesigned SoundCloud iOS and published it to Medium - Received over 37k views on Medium , 70% of which came from external shares (Google, email, direct, FB) - Case study included market audit, stakeholder research, feature ideation, and several prototypes Long: - Grew up with heavy interest in human consciousness - what factors shape the way we behave - believing professional health field was the closest I could get - Halfway through college, switched from becoming a clinical psychologist/doctor to a technologist - Focused on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information (language, attention, memory, reasoning, emotion) - To me, UX is a mirror for human behavior, psychology, sociology, ethnography, culture - Provides a unique perspective on who we are as individuals and who we are as a society
