UI Developer Interview Question

Question

I keep getting the following question in interviews; and judging from the reactions I've gotten, I'm not giving the best answer. "What methodology do you use for developing user interfaces?" Which seems like a rather broad question.

Besides dividing work between markup, stylesheets, and javascript (control logic), what are the best practices? What am I missing in this question?

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Its a very broad and open ended question, so there's no "right" answer. With that being said, your answer is being compared to other candidates.

Just judging on what you said, I'd probably try a different approach. Dividing markup / styles / javascript is great from a coding design standpoint. But you could write perfect code in that manner and still have a terrible UI.

Rather than divulge in a long drawn-out description of how to go about UI design, I'd recommend this book. Its not the be-all-end-all book, but it will give you some good ideas.

UI is very broad and subjective. If you think you know it all, that means you're just starting. Best of luck :)

Answer 2

My guess is that they are referring to things like progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, paper prototyping, storyboards, etc. It might also extend into UI testing strategies.

Mentioning those would at least give you some keywords to shape your answer around.

Answer 3

They are probably expecting you to answer something like "Model View Controller (MVC)" or "Model View ViewModel (MVVM)". And I suppose that if you answer just "Document - View" it would be oh-so-nineties and oh-so-not-kosher-anymore.

Answer 4

This may seem silly, but ask them to break down what it is that they really mean in their broad question. More times than not (in my experience), questions like those are asked as a two phase approach:

1. They know that this is a broad question and unlikely to be answered very well and are looking for you to clarify the question (a form of requirements gathering really)
2. Once all the pieces of the puzzle are in place, how well do you tackle each subtopic of their original broad question?

Just my two cents :)

Answer 5

It would be better to approach this question with an aesthetic angle rather than being totally technically. By aesthetic, I mean the following

• Have a look at the company's website and compare it with the layout of an another company.
• Research a few layout designs on the web
• Focus on how you would present the design and would collect the data for presenting the design.
• Always give priority to the ease of use rather than heavy-duty functionality
• Style your answer with the above points and then stress on the methodology you would use to solve them.

The above points are in addition to the strong theoretical foundations you must be expected to answer in interviews. By methodology, I perceive the interviewers are expecting you to define an application, its layout and the ways in which you create it. Try to be holistic in your approach in answering broad questions. Point some latest improvements in browser technology that could make the UI better. You could get more specific information on the UI site.