Cracking Interviews and Getting Into the QED42 Design Team

Design possesses the ability to influence the world. It is capable of impacting and leaving lasting impressions. At QED42, design has always been an exciting process. Ideas, theories, and endless possibilities are what have defined the team, which has grown leaps ever since it first was introduced.

Opportunities are often quite diverse and like most design teams, we too believe in the idea of finding the right balance between experience and cultural fit. In this blog we’ll provide you with a sneak peek into how design team interviews are conducted at QED42, thus helping you prepare for a possible exciting design career with us!

What to expect?

Our interview process is mainly threefold with a fourth round, based on the requirement. It starts with a talent acquisition call, followed by an interview round and if necessary a take-home assignment round. The second round is a video call discussion round with the design lead or a design manager. The third round focuses on your work and how good you are at managing teams, multiple projects, reaching goals, synthesizing data, and the like.

Based on the position applied for, there’s a fourth third round where we give you a take-home assignment that helps us understand your work, how you manage time, and your level of creativity a bit better.

Step I - The Talent Acquisition call

The search for the best creative mind starts with a brief 30-minute talent acquisition call with a recruiter. The purpose of this call is to get an understanding of your past experiences.

A general call with a focus on what you bring to the table.

After you’ve had the talent acquisition call and your profile has been shortlisted, it is sent to the design team’s lead and manager, for the second interview round, i.e. - the design team interview round.

Step II - The Design Team interview round

This is usually a 40-45 minute call, with a design manager or a design lead (based on your profile and role applied for). In this round, the discussions are a bit more in detail. We focus on past work experiences, problem-solving skills, and product thinking abilities. We also look into your experience in handling a team of designers.

If the position applied is for a junior level, then these are the only two rounds conducted, and based on the answers given during the interview, a final call is taken. However, if the position is a senior one, then two more rounds (as are given below) are conducted to better gauge position and company fit!

Thus, after we’ve had a good understanding of your capabilities, it’s time to have a look at some of your work and that’s the case study round.

Step III - Case Study Presentation round

The case study round is an open discussion video chat round, where you’ll be in talks with several members of the design leadership team. This round is usually conducted when it is a senior position (i.e. - Senior UI/UX designer, Design Lead, Senior Graphic Designer, and the like)

• You’ll have an hour only to showcase your work. We expect adherence to the time deadline.
• Provide a walkthrough of 1-2 projects that you’ve actively been a part of, contributed directly to, and/or have led a team in. The focus should be on different aspects that include and aren’t limited to - cross collaborations, stakeholder management, data and experimentation skills, and your method of leading a team when driving the design process.
• At QED42, we like to know people, both for the experience and ability to adapt and so be well prepared to engage in some Q and A sessions and fruitful discussions, right from the word go!
• We suggest entrusting enough time to be able to cover (in detail) 1-2 projects at the least. This includes giving us an in-depth overview of where and how you were responsible for leading a team from its inception to launch. We encourage you to provide us with supporting documents, i.e. - wireframes, sketches, approaches, mockups, finished designs, and the like. This will help us to discuss and understand the process and details of the project better.
• P.S. - a final word of advice on this round - Dig in and go deep (within the time frame, that is) and provide all you’d like on team set-up, product context, prototypes, wireframes, your approach during each process, your contributions and ideas, collaborations, testing and your overall ownership of the product cycle.

We want to know what you did, how you did it, and what contributions you made in creating the best possible outcome for the product.

Preparing for the Case Study - what to keep in mind

We’d like for you to create a deck using the given framework to showcase a team case study. It can either be project-focused or internal-structure-focused. We leave that to your discretion.

Describe the challenges faced and the metrics set for success and give a brief introduction of your team and the role you played. Walk us through the research methods opted for (can include benchmarking, user interviews, and the like), describe the pain points, and showcase the process and iterations. In case there is validation and prototyping, we’d like to see those too.

We’d like for you to explain how you worked with teammates and stakeholders. Finally, wow us with the final output and sum up the results and learnings while giving insights into how the user was impacted positively and how you knew the same.

Brownie points 

• Show us your best work, one that you’re truly proud of and is sure to be engaging
• Provide a key flow or a few screens of experience that can highlight your amazing design work
• Work that’s been shipped will land better, provided you’ve got the complete story to tell
• Detail description of the problem that’s been identified and tackled by you. Showcase the goals of the project and how you’d planned on solving them through your design process
• A well-structured approach to identifying the problem and describing it, providing proposed solutions and clear goals that connect to the actual problem and adequate data to support the decisions made
• Show your involvement in the research phase of the project and how you’d utilised the data gathered
• Show prototypes, and wireframes and go in-depth with the same because you’ll be in conversation with product designers that enjoy this
• Provide emphasis on excellent visual skills, a good understanding of typography, layouts, and UX/UI
• Lots and lots of prototypes! The more the better because we believe trials are even better than the results!
• Describe the testing process and what led to the final outcome of the product
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, i.e. - with the team and product engineers, project managers, and the like
• A detailed look into your problem-solving and user-centric approach during the product design cycle
• Describe what worked and what didn’t work in your favor and what you would/could have done differently
• Reflect on how you quantified the success of the project and how you tested it before the final outcome

Step IV - Take Home Assignment

This step is level and role-specific, depending on whether you’ve applied to be a visual designer, UI/UX designer, and UX writer. It mostly consists of a task that helps design team stakeholders take a well-thought-out decision and also lets us see and understand your process a bit better.

Possible questions asked

Like every interview, our purpose is also to try and get a clearer vision of what makes you a good fit for both the team and the organization. Our questions are challenging, interactive, and fun. It involves interacting with all the major design team stakeholders and we assure you it’ll be super fun!

We’re attaching a pdf doc. of some of the possible questions that are usually asked in our interviews so that you’re well prepared, going in!

Design Interview Questions

Our questions focus on how committed you are to your craft, your work ethics, and how you engage in planning and scoping your work and execution. We try to understand your ability to work in a team, and how open you are to taking differences of opinion. While we do look into how you might set into a team, we also try to gauge whether you’d be a good cultural fit for the organization.

All said and done, we’re excited to meet you and have you as part of the team. So, head to our careers section or drop us your resume and we can take it from there!