17 interaction designer interview questions and answers

An interaction designer plays a critical role in connecting your company with customers through digital platforms. They create seamless digital experiences on your website and other online products. With an interaction designer who knows the ins and outs of the job, you can avoid losing customers to competitors.

Asking the right interview questions during hiring helps you find interaction designers who can elevate your company’s digital products.

Interaction designers need more than just UI/UX design skills – they must also be adaptable and possess strong communication and collaboration abilities, for example. Your interview questions should aim to explore multiple dimensions of each candidate’s expertise, experience, and personality.

In this guide, we’ll highlight 17 interaction designer interview questions to ask during your hiring campaign.

How to assess a candidate’s interaction design skills

Interviews are important, but they’re just one component of an effective hiring process. Your process for hiring an interaction designer should start with an effective interaction designer job description and follow up with pre-employment testing, which evaluates an applicant’s role-specific skills, personality, and work behaviors based on their responses to test questions and scenarios.

Pre-employment testing is especially valuable in the early stages of your hiring process. It enables you to select top candidates to advance to the later stages – like remote or in-person interviews.

With TestGorilla, you can build custom pre-employment assessments that let you dig into an applicant’s interaction design skills and better understand the value they’ll add to your business. For example, we offer a UX/UI design test ideal for interaction design candidates. It assesses skills like design thinking, wireframing, and prototyping.

You can combine up to five tests from TestGorilla’s library to build custom assessments. Tests for interaction designers cover programming languages like HTML5 and CSS and soft skills like attention to detail and problem-solving.

Better yet, TestGorilla makes it easy to add custom questions to any assessment. You can even incorporate the interview questions we cover below, as well as UX interview questions, questions about work motivation, and more.

You can use our one-way video interview software to send your questions directly to applicants – who can then submit video responses at their convenience. And if you want to use our interview questions for in-person or remote interviews that can supplement your initial assessments, you can do that, too.  

17 interview questions and answers for interaction design roles

Let’s look at 17 interaction designer interview questions you can ask your candidates and what you should look for in their responses.

Interaction designer technical interview questions

Interaction design is a highly technical role that requires a strong grasp of design principles and experience with design software. These questions will help you evaluate how well an interaction design job applicant knows the role’s technical side.

1. What interaction design methods do you use most?

Interaction designers can take multiple approaches to building websites and other digital products, so their answers to this question may vary widely. For example, some candidates prefer audience surveys to discover what users want from a product experience. Others may focus on product strategy or revenue generation to decide which design elements to emphasize.

Ideally, they’ll be able to discuss different design methods they’ve used in the past and their pros and cons. You may want to follow up by asking them for specific examples of times they used each design approach. Examples should include the applicant’s rationale for choosing that approach.

2. What software have you used to prototype your designs? 

A wide range of software platforms are available to interaction designers, including Adobe XD, Sketch, InVision Studio, and Proto.io. Knowing whether an interaction design applicant has experience with these platforms is essential, particularly if your company uses one of them.

Even if your business doesn’t have a preferred prototyping software, this question can help you understand the breadth of a candidate’s experience. Candidates who have tried several different platforms are more likely to be curious about the interaction design landscape and willing to put in effort to find tools that work best for them.

3. Which tools and performance indicators have you used to measure design outcomes?

Interaction designers need ways to measure whether their design is effective. They should be able to describe multiple indicators they examine after completing a project, such as how long it takes users to complete a task and what portion of users complete it successfully.

Interaction designers should also be familiar with practices such as surveys, A/B testing, and segmenting audiences. Ideally, they’ll have experience with tools designed specifically for measuring design outcomes, such as CrazyEgg, Usabilla, and TryMyUI.

4. Which coding languages have you used in the past?

Interaction designers don’t necessarily need to be familiar with programming languages as part of their work. However, designers familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can make small changes to your company’s website and other online products without reassigning tasks to your software engineers. This can boost productivity and the speed with which they can iterate changes.

To learn more about an interaction designer’s coding and web design skills, check out our web design interview questions guide.

5. How do you ensure your design is effective across web and mobile devices?

One of the biggest challenges interaction designers face is creating designs that work equally well on web and mobile devices. That’s crucial since more than 58% of web traffic comes from mobile devices.

Interaction designers should be able to describe their familiarity with responsive design and how they’ve implemented it during past projects. Responsive design uses flexible layouts that automatically adapt to screens of different sizes and orientations.

You can follow up on this question by asking a candidate to share examples of past work that incorporates responsive elements successfully.

6. How do you stay current with the latest consumer and design trends?

Design best practices are constantly changing, especially as code evolves and new devices offer different ways to access the internet. Interaction designers need to stay current on the latest industry trends to ensure that your company’s products don’t fall behind.

Candidates should be able to describe multiple methods they use for staying abreast of the latest trends. These could include following well-known interaction designers, reading industry newsletters, spending time each day exploring the web for outstanding website designs, and attending design-focused conferences.

Interaction designer experience interview questions

Not every interaction designer needs years of experience to succeed at your company, especially if you’re hiring for an entry-level role. However, your interview process is an excellent chance to understand the experience an applicant can bring to your company and the value of that experience.

7. What’s the most difficult interaction design assignment you’ve worked on and why?

Every interaction designer has worked on at least one challenging project, and this question gives them a chance to discuss it. Importantly, they should be able to identify which aspects of the assignment were demanding and what they learned in the process.

This question is essential for senior-level design roles. You want to be confident that the candidate you choose is comfortable taking on challenging assignments and has a history of successful problem-solving.

8. Have you had a project that wasn’t successful? How did you respond?

Interaction designers may have past projects that failed for various reasons, including a change in a company’s direction or a mismatch between the design outcomes and the company’s goals. Candidates should be able to identify what went wrong and discuss how the project wound down.

Understanding what happened and what an applicant learned from the experience can be very helpful for understanding how they may respond to adversity at your company. 

9. What design changes would you make to our website or product?

You should expect applicants to do their research about your company in advance of an interview. That includes looking at your company’s website and identifying some elements of the user experience they would potentially change if you hire them.

A candidate’s answer will show whether they took the time to prepare for your interview and are seriously interested in working for your company. Additionally, their answer should draw heavily on their interaction design experience. They should be able to point to specific elements they would change and explain why based on their experience.

Interaction designer communication and collaboration interview questions

Interaction designers don’t work in isolation. These questions will help you assess a candidate’s ability to collaborate with UI and UX designers, managers, and colleagues.

10. What is your preferred process for working with user experience and user interface designers?

This question can give insight into how an applicant approaches team design projects involving UX and UI designers.

Experienced candidates should be able to give an example of a past project when they worked with another designer. Newer interaction designers can speak more generally about how they approach collaboration, including whether they prefer to prototype a design on their own before getting feedback or whether they like to build a prototype collaboratively.

11. Can you give an example of a time you disagreed with a product manager? How did you come to a resolution?

There will likely be a time in every designer’s career when they have a different vision for a product than the product manager. A key quality of top interaction designers is the ability to find compromises that leave both parties happy and achieve the project's goals.

Relatively new designers may not have had disagreements in their past work. However, they should still be able to discuss how they would approach conflict with a product manager and find a compromise.

12. Do you prefer to work alone, in small teams, or with groups of designers?

This question provides more information about an interaction designer’s preferred work style. There’s no best answer, but identifying early on whether there’s a mismatch between a candidate’s work style and your role is essential.

For example, a candidate who prefers to work in a large team won’t be a good fit for a role requiring them to work primarily alone.

13. How do you build consensus with colleagues around design choices?

Interaction designers need to communicate clearly and effectively with colleagues about their work and their design choices. This is especially important for working alongside UI and UX designers, who may approach the same design problems from different perspectives.

Look for candidate responses that demonstrate an applicant’s ability to listen to these other perspectives and incorporate them into their work. Candidates should also be able to describe their collaboration process from ideation to prototyping to production.

Interaction designer adaptability interview questions

Interaction designers need to be flexible enough to meet the needs of different projects and adapt to changing priorities for your business. These questions can help you assess candidates’ adaptability in the workplace.

14. How do you respond to criticism of your designs?

Interaction designers often receive praise for their work, but they must also be able to handle constructive criticism and negative feedback.

Look for answers to this question emphasizing flexibility, compromise, and a willingness to learn. Applicants who are combative in response to criticism may not be the right fit for your company.

15. How do you prioritize tasks when you have multiple competing design projects?

Your company’s interaction designer is likely in high demand, and they may have more work than time to actually do it.

So, an applicant needs to have a system for prioritizing assignments that works for them. Look for answers that include concrete approaches to prioritization, including working with managers, setting project milestones, and assigning importance to different tasks. 

16. What do you do when the demands of a design project change unexpectedly?

Project goals can sometimes change partway through a design project due to changes in funding, management, or other factors. Interaction designers must be resilient enough to deal with these changes and find ways to complete projects quickly despite changes.

Candidates can answer this question by describing how they salvage value from work they’ve already done. They can also explain how they reset their design mindset to approach modified goals and how they work with managers to deliver a quality product.

17. How do you manage stress and avoid burnout on a project?

Burnout can reduce productivity and cause designers to leave your company. So, interaction designers should have good ways to deal with stress when working on demanding projects.

Applicants should describe how they cope with work stress and achieve work-life balance. This question can also provide an opening for candidates to ask about your company's culture and time-off policies.

Learn more: 17 interaction designer interview questions and answers

Hire the best interaction designer today with TestGorilla

These interaction designer interview questions can help you evaluate an interaction designer’s technical skills, design experience, collaboration abilities, and adaptability. Incorporating them into your assessment process will help you hire the best interaction designer for your open role.

There are multiple ways to include these interview questions in your hiring process. In addition to using them in face-to-face interviews, you can use TestGorilla’s testing platform to add them as custom questions to your assessments. The same assessments can help you evaluate a candidate’s UI and UX designer skills, soft skills, personality, and more.

Hiring an interaction designer who fully understands their role is crucial for delivering an exceptional online experience that fosters customer loyalty.

Get started with TestGorilla for free today and gain unlimited access to 10 of our most popular tests. You can also sign up for a free 30-minute live demo to see all the features TestGorilla offers to streamline your hiring process.