What is a UX/UI Designer at Becton Dickinson?

As a UX/UI Designer at Becton Dickinson (BD), you are stepping into a critical role within a global medical technology leader. Your work directly influences the digital interfaces of diagnostic tools, clinical software, and internal enterprise systems. At BD, design is not just about aesthetics; it is about patient safety, clinical efficiency, and modernizing legacy platforms to meet the rigorous demands of modern healthcare.

You will be tasked with bridging the gap between complex technical requirements and intuitive user experiences. The impact of this position is substantial. By streamlining workflows and clarifying data visualization for medical professionals and lab technicians, your designs help reduce cognitive load and minimize life-threatening errors. You will often find yourself advocating for the user in an environment that has historically been engineering-driven.

Expect a role that challenges your ability to champion human-centered design within a traditional corporate structure. You will work closely with development teams, product managers, and senior stakeholders. Success in this role requires a blend of rapid execution, strategic thinking, and the emotional intelligence to navigate complex organizational dynamics and diverse stakeholder expectations.

Common Interview Questions

The questions below represent the types of inquiries you will face during your BD interviews. While you should not memorize answers, use these to identify patterns in what the company values: clear communication, resilience, and practical design execution.

Portfolio and Design Process

These questions test your core competency as a designer and how you approach complex problems from inception to delivery.

• Walk me through a project in your portfolio where you had to simplify a highly complex workflow.
• How do you determine when a design is "good enough" to hand off to engineering?
• Describe your process for rapid prototyping. What tools do you use and why?
• Tell me about a time you discovered your initial user assumptions were wrong. How did you pivot?
• How do you incorporate accessibility standards into your everyday design process?

Stakeholder and Conflict Management

Given the organizational structure at BD, interviewers want to see how you handle pushback, traditional mindsets, and difficult personalities.

• Tell me about a time you had to explain a UX concept to a stakeholder who had no design background.
• Describe a situation where you strongly disagreed with a product manager or senior leader. How did you handle it?
• How do you maintain your composure and professionalism if an interviewer or stakeholder is dismissive of your work?
• Give an example of how you successfully advocated for user research when the business wanted to skip it to save time.
• Tell me about a time you had to build consensus among a group of stakeholders with competing priorities.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

These questions, often asked by developers or product managers, assess your ability to work within a team environment.

• How do you handle design handoffs to ensure engineering builds exactly what you designed?
• Tell me about a time you had to compromise your design due to technical limitations.
• How do you prefer to receive feedback from developers during the design process?
• Describe a time you worked on a project with a very tight deadline. How did you prioritize your design tasks?
• What do you do if you notice a developer has implemented your design incorrectly during QA?

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparation for a design role at Becton Dickinson requires more than just a polished portfolio. You must be ready to articulate your process, defend your decisions, and demonstrate how you operate within a highly regulated, cross-functional environment.

Focus your preparation on these key evaluation criteria:

• Design Craft & Execution – Interviewers will look at your ability to translate complex requirements into rapid wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs. You need to show that you can iterate quickly without losing sight of usability.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration – You will be evaluated on how effectively you partner with developers and product managers. BD values designers who understand technical constraints and can build strong rapport with engineering teams.
• Stakeholder Management & Advocacy – This is a critical area. You must demonstrate the ability to present design concepts to non-design stakeholders, handle pushback gracefully, and educate others on the value of UX in a traditional corporate setting.
• Resilience and Adaptability – The interview process and the role itself require navigating ambiguity and legacy systems. Interviewers want to see how you maintain composure and focus when faced with shifting timelines, communication gaps, or challenging personalities.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a UX/UI Designer at Becton Dickinson is thorough and involves multiple touchpoints across different teams. Typically, your journey will begin with a 30-minute initial phone screen with a recruiter, focused on your background, availability, and high-level fit. This is followed by a one-hour virtual interview with the hiring manager, where you will dive deeper into your portfolio, your design philosophy, and your past experiences.

If successful, you will advance to a half-day interview loop. This stage is highly collaborative and usually involves meeting with members of the UX team, developers, and key cross-functional stakeholders. You may be asked to present a case study from your portfolio, followed by dedicated sessions focusing on technical design skills, behavioral questions, and team fit.

Be prepared for potential scheduling quirks or extended timelines. The process can sometimes feel disjointed, with gaps in communication or last-minute meetings with senior decision-makers scheduled outside standard business hours. Flexibility, patience, and proactive follow-up are essential traits to exhibit throughout the recruitment cycle.

This visual timeline outlines the typical progression from your initial recruiter screen to the final stakeholder interviews. Use this to anticipate the pacing of your preparation, ensuring your portfolio presentation is fully polished before the hiring manager round, and reserving your energy for the rigorous half-day loop. Keep in mind that specialized stakeholder interviews may be added near the end of the process.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed in the BD interview loop, you must deeply understand the specific areas where you will be evaluated. Interviewers will probe your technical skills, your approach to problem-solving, and your interpersonal resilience.

End-to-End Design Process

Your interviewers need to know that you possess a reliable, repeatable design process. At BD, you will often need to move quickly from ambiguous requirements to tangible artifacts. They want to see how you gather user insights, structure information, and arrive at a final UI.

Be ready to go over:

• Rapid Wireframing – Your ability to quickly generate low-fidelity concepts to align stakeholders before committing to high-fidelity designs.
• Usability Testing in Healthcare – How you validate designs when access to actual end-users (like clinicians or lab technicians) might be restricted by regulatory or privacy concerns.
• Systems Thinking – How your specific UI choices fit into the broader ecosystem of BD software and legacy platforms.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Designing for accessibility (WCAG compliance) in medical devices, and creating modular design systems for enterprise software.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through a time you had to design a solution with highly ambiguous or incomplete requirements."
• "How do you balance the need for rapid wireframing with the necessity of thorough user research?"
• "Show us a project where your initial design failed during testing. How did you iterate?"

Stakeholder Management and Advocacy

Because Becton Dickinson is a large, established enterprise, UX maturity can vary significantly between divisions. You will interact with stakeholders who may not fully understand human-centered design. Your ability to communicate the "why" behind your designs is heavily scrutinized.

Be ready to go over:

• Defending Design Decisions – Using data, research, and best practices to justify your UI choices to skeptical stakeholders.
• Handling Pushback – Remaining professional and constructive when your ideas are challenged or dismissed by leadership.
• Educating Non-Designers – How you bring developers, product managers, and business leaders along on the design journey.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to work with a difficult stakeholder who did not agree with your design approach."
• "How do you handle situations where a senior leader requests a feature that you know is detrimental to the user experience?"
• "Describe a scenario where you had to compromise on a design due to business or technical constraints."

Collaboration with Engineering

Design at BD does not happen in a vacuum. You will work closely with developers to implement your visions. Interviewers from the engineering team will evaluate how well you understand their world and how effectively you collaborate.

Be ready to go over:

• Handoff Processes – How you prepare your files, document interactions, and communicate specifications to developers.
• Technical Constraints – Your understanding of front-end capabilities and how you adjust your designs to meet legacy system limitations.
• Continuous Integration – How you handle QA and design reviews during the development sprint.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "How do you ensure your designs are implemented accurately by the development team?"
• "Tell me about a time a developer told you your design was impossible to build. How did you resolve it?"
• "What is your process for documenting complex micro-interactions for engineering handoff?"

Key Responsibilities

As a UX/UI Designer at Becton Dickinson, your day-to-day work will revolve around transforming complex medical and enterprise workflows into intuitive digital experiences. A significant portion of your time will be spent churning out rapid wireframes and prototypes to help product and engineering teams visualize solutions early in the development cycle. You will be responsible for creating user flows, high-fidelity mockups, and interactive prototypes that align with both user needs and strict regulatory standards.

Collaboration is at the core of your daily routine. You will partner closely with product managers to define requirements and with developers to ensure seamless execution. Because there may not always be a massive, centralized design team on every project, you will often act as the primary UX advocate within your specific pod or division. This requires you to present your work frequently to cross-functional teams, gathering feedback and iterating quickly.

Additionally, you will play a role in modernizing legacy systems. Many of BD's internal and diagnostic tools are built on older frameworks. Your responsibility will involve mapping out existing, outdated workflows and systematically redesigning them to improve efficiency and reduce user error, all while navigating the technical constraints of legacy enterprise architecture.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be a competitive candidate for this role at Becton Dickinson, you must bring a strong mix of technical design execution and soft skills tailored to a corporate environment.

• Must-have skills – Expert proficiency in industry-standard design tools (Figma, Sketch, Adobe Creative Suite). A strong portfolio showcasing end-to-end design processes, particularly complex problem-solving and rapid wireframing. Excellent verbal and written communication skills to articulate design rationale.
• Experience level – Typically requires 3 to 5+ years of experience in UX/UI design, preferably within enterprise software, B2B platforms, or complex dashboard environments.
• Soft skills – High emotional intelligence, extreme patience, and the ability to maintain professionalism under pressure. You must be a self-starter who can navigate ambiguity and advocate for the user without becoming defensive.
• Nice-to-have skills – Previous experience in healthcare, medical devices, or highly regulated industries (e.g., finance, defense). Familiarity with front-end coding languages (HTML/CSS) to better communicate with developers. Experience working as a contractor or in hybrid internal/external team structures.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How long does the interview process typically take? The timeline can vary significantly. While some stages move quickly, it is not uncommon to experience delays of several weeks between the hiring manager screen and the final loop, or between the final loop and an offer decision. Patience is essential.

Q: What is the culture like for UX Designers at BD? The culture is highly professional and leans traditional, typical of a legacy medical technology company. While you will work with passionate UX and dev peers, you will also encounter stakeholders who are still learning the value of human-centered design. It is an environment ripe for impact if you are resilient.

Q: Will I need to complete a whiteboard challenge or take-home design exercise? While practices vary by team, BD generally relies more heavily on in-depth portfolio presentations and behavioral interviews rather than take-home assignments. Be prepared to talk through your past work in granular detail.

Q: How should I handle an interviewer who seems disengaged or asks irrelevant questions? Stay calm, professional, and respectful. Answer the questions to the best of your ability while gently steering the conversation back to your design expertise and the value you bring to the role. Treat it as a test of your stakeholder management skills.

Q: Is this role typically remote, hybrid, or onsite? This depends heavily on the specific division and location (e.g., Sparks, MD vs. Seattle, WA). Many roles operate on a hybrid model, requiring you to be on a corporate campus a few days a week. Clarify this with your recruiter early in the process.

Other General Tips

• Over-communicate your process: When presenting your portfolio, do not just show the final, polished UI. BD wants to see the messy middle—the wireframes, the iterations, and the trade-offs you made along the way.
• Prepare for scheduling quirks: Be flexible. You may be asked to accommodate early morning interviews to meet with specific decision-makers or senior stakeholders. Treat these requests with professionalism.
• Speak the language of healthcare: Even if you do not have medical device experience, familiarize yourself with terms like "regulatory compliance," "patient outcomes," and "clinical workflows." Showing you understand their domain will set you apart.
• Follow up proactively: Because the recruiting process can sometimes experience communication lags, do not be afraid to send polite, periodic follow-up emails to your recruiter to reiterate your interest and ask for updates.

Summary & Next Steps

Securing a UX/UI Designer role at Becton Dickinson offers a unique opportunity to shape the digital interfaces of products that save lives and improve healthcare globally. It is a position that requires not only a sharp eye for interface design but also the strategic mindset of a UX advocate who can navigate a massive, complex enterprise. By preparing to speak confidently about your end-to-end process, your collaboration with engineering, and your ability to manage difficult stakeholders, you will position yourself as a mature, capable candidate.

Remember that the interview process itself is a reflection of the job. You will need to demonstrate patience, clear communication, and resilience. Approach every conversation—even the challenging ones—as an opportunity to showcase your professionalism and your commitment to human-centered design. Keep your portfolio presentation focused on problem-solving, and be ready to defend your decisions with grace and data.

This compensation data provides a baseline expectation for design roles within the organization. Use this information to understand the typical salary bands, but remember that actual offers will vary based on your location, years of experience, and whether the role is a direct full-time position or a contract arrangement.

You have the skills and the drive to succeed in this process. Take the time to refine your narrative, practice your behavioral responses, and prepare to show Becton Dickinson exactly how your design expertise can drive their mission forward. For more targeted insights and peer experiences, continue exploring resources on Dataford as you finalize your preparation. Good luck!