Interview Questions for a UX Designer
To interview a UX Designer, center the conversation on their portfolio, research practice, and design judgment rather than tool proficiency. This set covers questions that surface how they frame problems, run research, defend decisions in critique, and balance user needs against business and engineering constraints, plus behavioral and situational prompts.
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Anchor the interview in their real work: walk one project end to end and ask why at every fork. Then add a short live critique or whiteboard so you see thinking, not just polished case studies.
Craft: Research, Process & Critique
What to look for: A clear problem definition, the reasoning behind decisions, evidence they considered alternatives, and honest reflection on what they'd change.
What to look for: Matching method to question (interviews for why, usability tests for can-they, analytics for what), and not over- or under-researching.
What to look for: Genuine willingness to be wrong, learning from observed behavior, and translating a finding into a concrete design change.
What to look for: Structured critique tied to user goals and heuristics, specific not vague feedback, and prioritizing the highest-impact issue.
What to look for: Beyond color contrast: keyboard nav, focus order, semantic structure, screen readers, and treating accessibility as baseline not polish.
What to look for: Respect for evidence, interrogating whether the metric measures the right thing, and a bias toward testing rather than ego or pure HiPPO.
What to look for: Valuing consistency and speed, but recognizing when a pattern fails the user and how to propose a system change rather than a one-off.
What to look for: Defining success up front, behavioral metrics tied to the user goal, and closing the loop with post-launch research.
Behavioral
What to look for: Collaboration over insistence, finding the constraint early, and reaching a solution that still served the user.
What to look for: Advocating with evidence and user empathy, knowing when to concede, and keeping the relationship intact.
What to look for: Openness to feedback, separating self from the work, and a real behavior change as a result.
Situational / Problem-Solving
What to look for: Scrappy research (support tickets, analytics, guerrilla tests), stating assumptions explicitly, and de-risking before launch.
What to look for: Identifying the core user task, protecting critical-path usability, and being explicit about what's deferred.
What to look for: Digging past the stated want to the underlying job-to-be-done, and validating before building the literal request.
UX Designer interview scorecard
Score every candidate on the same criteria, immediately after the interview, using evidence you actually heard rather than an overall impression. Agree the criteria with the panel before the first interview — deciding what counts after you have met people is how the loudest interviewer wins the debrief.
| Criterion | Evidence to record | Score 1-5 |
|---|---|---|
| Craft: Research, Process & Critique | What the candidate actually said or did, in their own example — not your impression of it | 1 2 3 4 5 |
| Behavioral | What the candidate actually said or did, in their own example — not your impression of it | 1 2 3 4 5 |
| Situational / Problem-Solving | What the candidate actually said or did, in their own example — not your impression of it | 1 2 3 4 5 |
| Overall recommendation | Strong no / no / mixed / yes / strong yes, with the single reason that decided it | - |
Want this as a reusable document? Use the interview scorecard template.
Questions to avoid asking a UX Designer
Exactly which questions are unlawful depends on where you are hiring, and the rules change — so treat this as the list of topics to route through your own employment counsel, not as a legal standard. The practical test that holds everywhere: if the answer could not change how the person does this job, you have no reason to ask it.
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Frequently asked questions
What should a UX Designer's portfolio review actually reveal?
Should I separate UX research and UI design in the interview?
How do I run a fair design exercise without unpaid work?
What are red flags in a UX Designer interview?
How much tool proficiency should I test for?
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