Dezi: Your design interview coach
Interview with confidence. Dezi is an AI-powered coach that provides the feedback on your interview skills.
Project overview.
Objective:
Design a platform that lets job seekers in the design field practice their interview skills and get feedback on their performance.
My role:
UX research and design. 1:1 interviews with designers, created a customer journey map and customer task flow; designed wireframes, created a high-fidelity desktop version of the main page and key flow, remote user testing and analysis.
UX content strategy. Developed the IA and course content outline and interview questions.
Constraints:
On spec.
No more than 100 hours.
Focus on the homepage and main task flow.
Project timeline:
December 2021 to March 2022
Understanding the problem.
As designers, we spend countless hours on projects researching, asking questions, defining problems, mastering Figma, making sure our designs are pixel perfect, and agonizing over our portfolios.
But how do you prepare for a design interview? For example,
What does a good elevator pitch sound like?
What questions should you prepare for?
How do you sound when you present your portfolio?
How could you improve your delivery?
Gathering insights.
As a career switcher enrolled in a UX bootcamp, I found it easy to empathize with people heading into their first design interview experience. Design interviews, I learned, followed a different format, including a portfolio presentation, critiques of existing apps, and whiteboarding exercises.
To learn how other designers felt, how they prepared for interviews, and what they learned from their interview experiences I did the following:
Spoke with three designers who are breaking into the UX field and searching for their first job.
Read the Slack channel “I Got the Job” to learn about the experience of designers who had just landed their first UX job.
Talked with two hiring managers to learn what they look for in junior designers.
What I learned from User Research
Feeling anxious and self critical was universal.
People wanted to practice. Designers used mentors, friends, and family to practice mock interviews and their elevator pitches.
Designers shared interview questions with each other to prepare.
They watched YouTube videos on how to best answer questions.
They recorded themselves answering questions and replayed the recording to understand how they sounded and how they might improve.
New designers felt less alone when they talked to other designers about their interview experience.
Brainstorming solutions.
I created a board that gathered the designers’ feelings, thoughts, actions before and after interviews.
User Stories.
I used what I learned from my user interviews to write user stories and the brainstorm possible solutions and features. Then I grouped the stories and needs by theme (yellow stickie notes) and brainstormed potential features that address those needs (green stickie notes).
Customer Journey Map.
I also created a customer journey map for the new UX designer who might encounter the Designer's Interview Coach. I focused on these key questions:
Why do they start the journey?
Why would they trust [the platform I’m designing]
How can they feel successful?
Narrowing down the solutions to an MVP.
The customer journey map gave me an excellent roadmap of the kind of features and solutions needed for this interview platform. That said, I had a finite amount of time, needed to focus on solutions that would get me to a minimum viable product (MVP).
Connection and support turned out to be a huge factor in designers keeping their spirits up during the design interview process, but my research showed there were already a lot of existing communities online from Facebook groups to Slack channels to Discord boards.
Opportunity existed with the practice component. What if you didn’t have the time to rehearse with a mentor or had trouble finding a friend or colleague to practice with and get feedback from? You still needed to practice. My design interview coach platform could create courses that walked designers through the typical interview process, let them practice and record their interview, and get feedback from an AI-powered coach.
User Flow.
I used Whimsical to create a customer task flow for Luca, 29-year-old UX bootcamp student preparing from his first UX design interviews. The task flow put me in the mind of my potential user and created an outline to the types of actions he might take. Anticipating these actions would make wireframing more efficent since I’d know what UI I’d need to design.
Luca’s main needs and goals:
Wants to know what to expect during a UX interview.
See how to answer typical questions.
Understand what hiring managers are looking for.
Practice answers to typical questions.
Feedback on how he sounded.
Wireframing solutions.
High fidelity designs - version 1.
Wait. Why didn’t you user test the wireframes?
My deadline was drawing closer and I wouldn’t have time to test the wireframe in the field, design the high fidelity version, test the high fidelity version, and then make edits based on a second round of feedback.
My mentor also said that testing a high fidelity design for my main task flow would be a good opportunity for see if the UI that I designed gave users the proper feedback and clarity they needed to feel successful in the tasks I gave them.
How I tested the design.
I used Maze.co to conduct unmoderated remote user testing of a high-fidelity, clickable desktop prototype. A mix of 25 designers and nondesigners participated in the testing. 22 participants completed the entire test and 3 abandoned the test.
Walk through the prototype that I tested.
Scenario:
You’re a UX designer preparing for several upcoming interviews. You've decided to try Dezi, a design interview coaching website, to learn about the interview process and rehearse answers to typical questions.
Goals:
Validate whether participants could complete the main task flow: choosing interview questions, recording an interview, and getting feedback.
Determine how easy it was for participants to complete the tasks
Learn if people would find the idea of AI-powered feedback on vocal delivery valuable when practicing for design interviews.
Learn what people would want to do after getting feedback.
Test summary from Maze.co: https://app.maze.co/report/v6bg5tl1321pu0
What I learned from testing the design.
92% who started the test completed the the Practice-Record-Feedback flow.
Almost all the participants found tasks “easy” to complete.
(Average score: 2 (n=22) (1=very easy and 5=very difficult).Almost all the participants indicated they could imagine using this feature.
Average score = 4.7 (n=20) (1= strongly disagree, 5=strongly agree).
“I think it was really easy to use, and seems pretty helpful”
“I found it super useful that I could find the most asked questions and practice them. ”
“I love that it gives concrete feedback and gives me things I can actually work on”
Opportunities for improvement.
The majority of participants indicated that they would either replay their interview, re-record the answers, or review the transcript.
However, one tester noted that there was no way to re-record your answers after getting your feedback.
Two participants wanted to see a history or library of their recordings.
But, there was no obvious place for testers to see a library of their recordings or gauge their improvement over time.
Two people mentioned wanting to connect with peers.
The testers didn’t see the Top Recommendations box encouraging them to connect with peers.
Priority revisions.
Insights from my Usability Test led me to reiterate several of the screens. Below are the high-fidelity mockups of my final solutions.
You can also try out my version 2 prototype.
Pain Point #1:
Participants could not re-record their answers after getting Dezi’s feedback.
Design solution: Redesign the UI for the video to include a re-record option and introduce familiar multimedia controls.
Pain Point #2:
Testers wanted to see a library of their recordings and gauge their improvement over time.
Design solution: Added links to ‘My speaker profile’, ‘Recording library’, as well as ability to rename your recording on the final screen.
Pain Point #3:
The testers wanted to connect with peers and they didn’t see the related content box with that information
Design solution: Designed a more eye-catching related content box.
Takeaways.
My idea was solid: people really want a way to practice for interviews. Nearly all of my participants could imagine using a platform like Dezi to rehearse for job interviews. They also liked the concrete feedback AI could provide on their vocal delivery.
But,
AI will never replace the support and connection and content-related feedback you get with a real live community. If I were to move forward with this platform, I would need to consider how I might integrate opportunities to connect with people.
Developing and sticking to an MVP is critical to remain on-time when you have limited resources and time. I ended up designing screens that I wasn’t able to test because I was limited by the number of screens that I could test with Maze.co’s free plan. If I had narrowed my scope and targeted which flow I wanted to test, I could’ve used my time more wisely.