To excel in your interviews, you must understand exactly what the hiring team is looking for in each key session. The evaluation is structured around three primary pillars: your design portfolio, your real-time problem-solving skills, and your behavioral alignment.
Portfolio Presentation & Case Studies
The portfolio review is the cornerstone of your evaluation. The panel wants to see how you think, how you collaborate, and how you execute. They are looking for structured storytelling that clearly outlines the problem, the constraints, your approach, and the final business and user outcomes.
Be ready to go over:
- User research integration – How you gathered user insights and how they directly influenced your design decisions.
- Iterative design process – Showing the evolution of your work from low-fidelity wireframes to high-fidelity interactive prototypes.
- Business impact – Connecting your design solutions to tangible metrics, such as increased conversion, reduced drop-off, or improved advisor efficiency.
- Advanced concepts (less common) – Creating responsive layouts for complex data grids and managing shared component libraries within a larger design system.
Example scenarios:
- "Walk us through a project where you had to design a complex financial workflow under tight regulatory or compliance constraints."
- "Show us a case study where user testing proved your initial design assumptions wrong, and explain how you pivoted the user experience."
Whiteboard Design Challenge
The whiteboard exercise is designed to assess how you collaborate and solve problems under pressure. The interviewers do not expect a polished, final UI. Instead, they want to observe your methodology: how you define scope, identify user personas, map out flows, and sketch layout ideas.
Be ready to go over:
- Problem framing – Asking clarifying questions to narrow down an ambiguous prompt before you start sketching.
- User-centered mapping – Defining the user's goals, pain points, and the core tasks they need to accomplish.
- Information architecture – Organizing content logically on the screen and establishing a clear visual hierarchy.
- Advanced concepts (less common) – Accounting for edge cases, error states, and accessibility requirements in your real-time sketches.
Example scenarios:
- "Sketch out a dashboard experience that allows a financial advisor to quickly identify which client accounts require immediate attention."
- "Design a mobile-first onboarding flow for a new client trying to link their external bank accounts to their wealth portfolio."
Behavioral & Stakeholder Management
This session evaluates your emotional intelligence, adaptability, and communication style. Designing at a large institution like Ameriprise requires navigating diverse stakeholder opinions, technical limitations, and compliance reviews.
Be ready to go over:
- Handling constructive feedback – How you receive critique from design peers and non-design stakeholders.
- Influencing without authority – How you advocate for the user and convince cross-functional partners of the value of your design solutions.
- Developer collaboration – Your approach to ensuring design quality is maintained during the engineering implementation phase.
- Advanced concepts (less common) – Navigating situations where business goals directly conflict with the optimal user experience.
Example scenarios:
- "Tell me about a time you had to present a design to a senior stakeholder who had a completely different vision. How did you handle the situation?"
- "Describe a time when you had to compromise on your ideal design to meet a critical product launch deadline."