Practice — UX vs UI and the Design Process (5 questions)

Your team spent a month redesigning a SaaS product's dashboard: new typography, a tighter color system, better spacing, a cleaner component library. Stakeholders love how it looks. But the metric that triggered the project — the percentage of new users who reach their "first successful action" within a session — didn't move at all after launch.

1. Using the UX/UI distinction, explain why a successful UI overhaul can leave a UX problem completely untouched.
2. What information would you want, that a purely visual redesign process wouldn't have surfaced, to diagnose the real problem?
3. Name two categories of underlying issue (not visual ones) that commonly cause this exact pattern — activation metric flat despite a UI overhaul.
4. What would you change about how this project was scoped from the start to avoid this outcome next time?

An interviewer says: "We need a redesigned onboarding flow for a new feature, launching in two days. No budget for new user research. Walk me through what you'd actually do."

1. Which parts of the standard Discover → Define → Develop → Deliver process would you compress or skip, and what would you substitute for the missing research?
2. Which part(s) would you refuse to skip even under this deadline, and why?
3. How would you frame this compressed process out loud in a way that signals judgment rather than corner-cutting?

You're evaluating a job posting titled "UI/UX Designer" at a 200-person company with a dedicated research team, a mature design system, and separate "Content Designer" and "Design Systems Lead" roles already on staff.

1. Given what you know about how titles blur at small companies versus larger ones, what should you expect this specific role's actual scope to be, and why might it differ from the same title at a 12-person startup?
2. What three questions would you ask in the interview to find out the real scope before accepting an offer?

You're advising two teams:

• Team A is doing a one-time, three-month engagement to define and ship a brand-new checkout flow for an e-commerce client, with a clear start and end date.
• Team B owns an existing, live product feature indefinitely, iterating on it every sprint based on ongoing usage data and support feedback, with no defined "end" to the work.

1. Which process framing — Double Diamond or Design Thinking — fits each team better, and why?
2. What would go wrong, concretely, if each team used the framing suited to the other team's situation instead?

A colleague describes their last project: "We interviewed 6 users at the very start, then designed and built for two months without talking to anyone else, then ran one usability test right before launch and shipped regardless of what it found because we were out of time."

1. Walk through ISO 9241-210's five HCD requirements and identify which ones this project satisfied and which it violated.
2. What is the single change that would have the biggest impact on this project meeting HCD principles, without adding significant time?