Improvised Candidate Interview: 10 Unusual Questions for Hiring a UI Designer with Tremendous Creativity

UI designers are in very high demand in the software development industry nowadays. A UI designer creates wonderful components with the help of numerous UI kits on the website, web apps, and mobile apps that make an attractive, SEO friendly, and responsive website. With the increased demand for UI designers, the process to hire UI designers has also become challenging in the present marketplace. Information technology or IT recruitments process has become so professional and needs the help of a professional recruiter.

The newer trends of UI design and technology changes in this field are also posing a serious challenge for the recruitment managers to devise a proper pre-interview test exercise assessment and final interview questions. Let’s talk about the IT professional hiring challenges, the most suitable solutions and the top interview questions for hiring professional UI designers.

Challenges in IT Professional Recruitment

According to the Orbis Research Report 2019, the global market size of UX/UI design is about $130 million in 2019. This market is expected to grow at over 18.2% CAGR over the next six years to reach cross the $420 million mark by 2025. This substantial growth poses many challenges in how to accomplish a hiring process and how to build an interview questionnaire.

Huge Market Demand

There are 105,406 software developer jobs available on Indeed.com in the USA right now. Similarly, there is a huge demand for other disciplines in information technology. The supply is comparatively low to cater to this demand. What kind of people hire UI designers are also changing and expanding; thus, the demand is continuously increasing.

Finding Desired Skills

IT is the fastest-changing technology. It is very difficult to do the life case estimations due to the ever-changing nature of this field. The developers with the required skills are not easy to find in the marketplace due to the fastest-changing arena of information technology. So, the candidate’s technical skills for the desired task are a big challenge for the hiring managers.

Lofty Salaries

The average salary of a UI designer is about $90,697 per annum. It is increasing continuously. So, it is a big challenge for hiring managers to hire a good candidate for a reasonable salary in the marketplace. Candidates’ professional experience even costs more to the companies.

Tech Talent Retention

There are numerous benefits from hiring an in-house UI designer as compared to the remote designers. But, retaining in-house talent is a big challenge. Bigger companies offer lucrative salaries packed with fringes. UI designers whose freelance experience are strong can be a little solution to this challenge for the managers in such a situation.

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Major UI Designer Competencies

Before we dive into the major competencies of a UI designer, let’s have a look at what the UI designers do. A UI designer designs the buttons, checkboxes, text fields, sliders, tabs, scrolling bars, text fonts and other similar kinds of thing is done by the UI designer on a website interface or a web application.

The major competencies of a UI designer are explained below.

Creating Great User Experience

UI designer has to materialize the vision of UX designer into a reality that creates a great user experience. The UI designer focuses on the micro-level things on a single interface to offer great user experience and smooth navigation to the desired page on the website.

Understanding Modern Web Development Trends

A UI designer should be updated with the latest web development trends that create a greater user experience and offer a smooth browsing experience. Different types of design trends continue changing in the marketplace.

Technical Expertise to Deal with Designing Tools

UI designer should be an expert at different processes of web designing such as wireframes, user flows, prototypes, style guides, and others. He/she should have a strong knowledge of the tools used for those purposes. Knowledge of basic programming languages is definitely a must to fulfill these responsibilities.

Collaboration and Teamwork

A UI designer has to work with different kinds of specialists such as a UX designer, software developer, backend developer, software consultant, testers, and others. So, he/she should have a better understanding of the entire software development workflow. He should also have strong knowledge to present and defend the UX/UI design to all stakeholders.

User Experience Analysis

Measuring the user experience is a very tricky aspect. A UI designer should understand the complex metrics of user experience measurement and analysis. Neutral user feedback, visitor behavior analysis and other factors help a UI designer to make verify that the website is up to the expected level of user experience.

Top 10 Questions for Hiring a Great UI Designer

The interview questions may vary to the requirements of the job. But, the basic questions related to personal qualities, technical expertise, and professional attitude should be incorporated in an interview to have a deeper insight into the complete personality and technicality of a UI designer.
I would like to divide those 10 questions into the personal qualities, technical and professional attitude categories with 4:6:2 ratios respectively. Following are the interview questions generally asked by a UX/UI design agency.

Personal Qualities

Question #1 Why did you choose to become a UI designer?
This question should be asked to explore a personal interest, enthusiasm, and creativity of UI designer. As we know, GUI designer work is highly influenced by creativity, innovation, and aestheticism. The right answer should talk about these things.

Question #2 How you see working with a team of developers, testers, managers, and other stakeholders of a project?
This question is very critical to hire a team player with leadership qualities to mingle, adjust, understand, and learn from the team members and open. The best answer to this question should include the ability of UI designer to understand the importance of team members and different roles of the team in a project.

Question #3 What help you need while working on a UI design project?
This question should include the answer to all roles and the stakeholders that are helpful for a good UI designer. This answer also reflects your getting help from the team and how you coordinate with them and what help you provide to them. The UX, tester, backend developers, project managers, and product owners are the major roles to get help from.

Question #4 What are the most critical things that make a UI project a great success?
The answer to this question should explain the basic UX design idea, the technologies used for backend as well as frontend development. The testing methodology, timeline, project delivery, and quality of the product are important factors that make a project a great success.

Technical

Question #1 Tell me, what you understand about the UI design?
The answer to this question should focus on the outlook of a webpage or an application page. This must include the beauty, attractiveness, intuitiveness, colors, layouts, text size, fonts, the ease of navigation and other aspects that make a webpage looking awesome.

Question #2 How many principles of UI design you are familiar with?
The answer to this question should include some of the important aspects of different principles of user interface designs. A few of them are listed below:

# The tolerance principle
# The visibility principle
# The simplicity principle
# The reuse principle
# The feedback principle

Question #3 What do you know about the design language system DSL?
The answer to this question should talk about its major uses such as cross-platform synch, interface standards, identifying the inconsistent parts of the page and others. The definition of the DSL should also be part of this answer like the combination of reusable functions such as headers, buttons, fields, forms, etc.

Question #4 What major technologies and frameworks do you know about?
This answer should talk about the fundamental languages and technologies like HTML, CSS3, Angular JS, ReactJS, JavaScript, Bootstrap and others. The major tools for UI design should include InVision, Sketch, Balsamiq, Zeplin, Adobe XD and others.

Question #5 What will you do to improve the design of a user interface?
The answer to this question should cover technical knowledge with a creative approach. The answer should also talk about different components like navigational, input control, interface, and informational components to be at the right place and should be used right components rightly on the interface.

Question #6 How will change an existing UI design?
This answer should include the reason and information behind why the existing user interface is required to be changed. Then, talk about the professional approach to correct the positions, colors, and components of the webpage.

Professional Attitude

Question #1 How long do you work in a day?
The answer should not be rigid. The delivery, quality, and consistency of performance should be the core points of the answer.

Question #2 Why should we hire you?
This question is very fundamental for any professional interview. The answer should explore the solid reasons that talk about your skills, attitude, commitment, and value you will provide to the company.

Final Takeaway

The importance of UI design is increasing regularly. It is expected to become a multi-billion market very soon. The demand for UI designers is huge and supply is comparatively low. This poses many hiring challenges for managers. In this article, the top interview questions have been identified to hire a better UI designer.