Amazon.com Senior User Experience Designer Interview Questions & Reviews
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Updated Jan 20, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
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Interview Experience [?] Based on 4 ratings
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Senior User Experience Designer at Amazon.com
Posted Jan 20, 2012 — 1 of 1 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 (took 4 months)
My interview process took place over the course of 4 four months with approximately 6 visits to their office to meet with various team members. The process was initially very informal with the hiring manager gauging my interest. Eventually we transitioned to the formal interview process consisting of a day of 1:1 interviews and a return visit to present my portfolio and one working session with the team.
The 1:1 interviews were very scripted. There was very little small talk or friendly banter and it was difficult to get a read on the employees since the sessions were so robotic. It was clear the employees had been through an interview training class. I was coached to talk fast and be direct by the recruiter. I was asked questions like "What's your biggest success?", "What's your biggest failure?", " What would you change about our products?". Most people I met with seemed more interested in typing notes on their computer than engaging in a conversation. The in-person meetings followed up with requests for documentation samples relating to the projects I talked through. The following week I returned to present my portfolio.
Communication and feedback was spotty and infrequent between visits. When I was contacted, I was repeatedly assured that they were very much still interested in me. Well over a month and a half after my last visit, I was asked to return one more time for an hour long working session with the team where we would solve a real-world problem for one of their products.
When we completed our session I was told everything went very well and the recruiter would be in touch. During this visit I was informed that they were planning on making an offer. Two weeks later I had not heard anything about my last visit so I contacted the recruiter. The recruiter replied with a rather informal email stating "We've selected another candidate".
In hindsight I believe the haphazard nature of the interview process and poor communication probably reflects the nature of the work environment so it's probably for the best that it didn't work out. That said, I would feel a lot better if I had been given an explanation for why they didn't make an offer considering the amount of time and effort that went into the process on both our ends. If I didn't make the effort to reach out I'm fairly certain they would have never told me they selected someone else.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Group/Panel Interview, a Presentation and a Skills Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior User Experience Designer at Amazon.com
Posted Nov 17, 2011 — 1 of 1 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Nov 2011 (took 4+ weeks)
Amazon contacted me a few months after I had applied online to set up a phone interview for a position on the kindle cross platform team. After the first interview, they set up a second one a week after. This is when they showed how unorganized and unprofessional they were. For the second phone call, the wrong person called me asking for a totally different person. I was then contacted by somebody telling me the interviewer was too busy to talk. We setup another time. The next time, I was informed again that they were too busy to talk. So it took three times to get my second phone interview.
After passing the second phone screening and I was invited to fly up to Seattle. Everything was paid for and they set me up in Hyatt in downtown. It was a very nice room and area. The day before I flew out, they sent me an email stating I had to make a one hour presentation of my work. This was a surprise to me and really short notice.
On the day of the interview, I had a presentation and five personal interviews. A couple were from separate departments and the others were from the team I would be working for. I had one bar-raiser interview me who tried to intimidate me with a blank stare when asking behavioral questions. She would go against almost every answer I had even though my answers were made perfect sense. I had another bar-raiser type who made me whiteboard different design strategies for 30 minutes straight. During an interview with the team manager, I was told that I did not fit the 'Senior UX' role but would fit more as a Visual Designer.
This is the part that baffled me. I applied for two roles, 'UI Designer' and 'Senior UX Designer'. I'm the beginning I was told it would be for the latter but towards the end of the process they switched it suddenly to the senior position. This confused me as to which position I was interviewing for. Why would Amazon fly someone out for a position when the person isn't even 'qualified' to interview in the first place. This shows how unorganized they are as a company and why I will never interview with them again.
A week later, I had to send an email saying I had an offer from another company in order for them to subsequently call me with a short rejection voicemail. No reasons, nothing. Just a "thanks but no thanks".
The designers and product managers at Amazon think they are the all that, smarter than you and can't stop talking about themselves and what they've done. Truthfully, a lot of their portfolios aren't even up to par. They will continue to make second rate devices at a cheap price and sell a small fraction compared to iOS devices. They push products out without perfecting them and have no true design philosophy. They will never be on par with Apple design standards if they continue to hire designers not on their creativity but on how well they do on pressure exercises and behavioral questions. Look at Google before their recently changed design philosophy.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Presentation, a Skills Test and a Personality Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior User Experience Designer at Amazon.com
Posted Sep 27, 2010 — 3 of 3 people found this helpful
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Sep 2010 in Seattle, WA (took 6 weeks)
I was contacted by an Amazon recruiter the same day that I submitted my resume to the Amazon careers site. The recruiter asked for my design portfolio, which he forwarded to the hiring manager. One week later, I had my first phone interview with a member of the UX team for Kindle. This individual was currently a senior UX designer, so he would have been a potential team mate. He seemed very knowledgeable and asked excellent questions, several of which I answered by taking him through design examples from my portfolio. I asked him many questions in turn, including the turnover rate among UX designers and his current likes/dislikes at Amazon.
The following week I had my second phone interview with the hiring manager for the UX team. He indicated that although they were looking for a senior UX designer, there might be potential for a team lead position because I had management experience as a team lead. The hiring manager's questions were not as specific as the senior UX designer's, but he seemed more focused on overall culture fit than job experience. The majority of his questions were focused on how I handled situation X or situation Y, as well as the qualities I try to identify while interviewing designers at my current organization. He did not have access to my portfolio due to email issues and was late calling me for the phone interview.
The following week, I was invited to interview the Amazon offices at the new South Lake Union offices. The actual job interview was about 5 weeks after the initial phone call from the technical recruiters. They flew me into Seattle the day before the interview, put me up at a nice hotel, and covered daily expenses.
I took a taxi to the South Lake Union offices (the entire area is still under construction) and met with a senior recruiter in one of the conference rooms, who explained who I was going to meet with and the general structure of the day. This recruiter also said that the team's hiring decision would be available the following week. I then walked over to the Amazon cafeteria (Garage Cafe) with the development lead of the software team who built what the UX team designed. He was a nice guy, and we spent most of the lunch hour discussing how UX designers work with developers in different ways (Agile, design and development gates, tactical vs. strategic). After lunch, I walked through my UX design portfolio with 5-6 folks from the UX design team and answered questions about approach and deliverables.
After the portfolio review, I had series of 1:1 interviews - 3 with members of the UX design team and 1 with a director of an affiliated business unit. He was definitely the bar raiser interview. His questions were very straightforward, but I'm not necessarily certain we connected. The best 1:1 interview with was the sr. user experience designer who had initially interviewed me via phone. After discussing how I approach the different aspects of UX design, he posed a couple of design questions, which I tried to address via whiteboarding. We ran short of time, so I ended up spending 10 minutes on one exercise and 12 minutes on another. Despite my messy handwriting, he took photos of my whiteboard notes and sketches.
At the end of the day, I met with the manager of the UX team again. He asked me a couple more questions, asked what I talked about with the other team members, and then asked more culture-fit questions. He seemed especially curious if I would feel comfortable working on a single product line versus the handful that I currently juggle. (The implication was clearly a concern that I might get restless.)
Overall, the interview was a good experience. I did notice that Amazonians in the new offices seemed busy, tired, and generally very focused - but this matches other corporate cultures I've been exposed to. The new South Lake Union offices were very new and spacious - at least for the team I visited. (Apparently this is a contrast to the older Amazon offices further south in Seattle.)
The following week, I received a call from the recruiter saying that they had decided not to make me an offer. Amazon has a policy of not offering feedback, but she said that it had been a difficult choice for the team. I suspect I might have been too senior for the role since I have more than 10 years of experience. Or it might have been a culture-fit issue since my background is not primarily focused on consumer products.
In any case, it was a good experience. As a UX designer, the best part of the interview process was being able to give direct feedback to the product team about a product that I use frequently and like a great deal!
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Presentation and a Skills Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior User Experience Designer at Amazon.com
Posted May 11, 2010 — 2 of 2 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2010 in Seattle, WA (took 2 months)
I did go through the online process for applying, but I also had a friend push my resumé around to five different teams with open positions. I got calls from three of them, but not the one I ultimately wanted. At first. Later on the team with the position open that I desired (they design for a e-reading device) put me through two hour long phone interviews. Each one felt like a gate. The team seemed knowledgeable about me and pretty proficient with the interview process. Typically an interview would be followed by about 1 week of waiting, and then a couple days of scheduling and then another interview. Eventually I got a packet with a 1 sheet telling me how I needed to prepare for the full day (six hour) in house interview.
I put together a 50 min presentation of three of my projects focused around responding to the extensive guidelines of what I need to explain/present in my portfolio. That sheet was a godsend, as it really helped me prepare a portfolio that showed off my work.
The next day I showed up to the headquarters at 11:30 and had my presentation in front of six members of the team. I had lunch with my would-be boss, which was nice and informal. Amz paid. Then I was taken to another part of the campus and waited in a room as six different people gave me 45 min interview sessions. There were 3 whiteboard sessions with members of the design team that I met earlier, and two interviews were really about company and corporation fit.
Honestly they seemed like very driven, performance-oriented team, very focused on output over say creativity. Very smart people for sure, and fast.
I would have worked very hard for sure on that team. Being as there were no joint-interviews I didn't get the sense of teamwork so much as bullpen that I would have liked, but that's one day and experience that is probably not representative of the way they really work.
The experience was overly-thorough, and exhausting, and I'm sure by the fourth or fifth hour it was showing. I was in those offices from 11:30 to 5:30pm.
And then... nothing. I didn't hear for a week. And then I found out in a short phone call that although they really liked me, it wasn't a fit. And Amz has a policy of not offering feedback.
I did get some VERY good advice from another interviewer on another team about what he meant by "Senior" and it was clear from him why I was not Senior, but that was a different team.
My one complaint is this: I spent probably 10 hours preparing for a six hour day, and got no feedback at all. If that's what the Amz design experience is like, it's no wonder their web experience is equally hard to comprehend.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Group/Panel Interview, a Presentation and a Skills Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
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