At People, a UX/UI Designer plays a pivotal role in shaping how millions of users engage with one of the world's most recognizable media brands. Operating within a fast-paced, content-driven digital ecosystem, designers in this role are tasked with creating highly engaging, accessible, and intuitive digital experiences across web, mobile web, and native applications. The work directly impacts how stories are told, how multimedia content is consumed, and how audiences interact with editorial features on a massive scale.

This position sits at the intersection of user needs, editorial storytelling, and business monetization. A successful designer must balance clean, aesthetically pleasing layouts with complex technical constraints, such as ad integration, SEO requirements, and core web vitals performance. You will be designing for high-volume traffic where minor design optimizations can lead to substantial increases in user retention, page views, and overall brand loyalty.

The design team at People works in a highly collaborative, cross-functional environment alongside product managers, engineers, and editorial leads. Because the team operates with agility, designers are expected to take extreme ownership of their projects, from early-stage user research and wireframing to high-fidelity UI design and developer handoff. It is an exciting opportunity to apply modern design principles to a legacy brand, ensuring its digital presence remains cutting-edge and deeply user-centric.

To succeed in the interview process for a UX/UI Designer position at People, you must be prepared for a mix of deep portfolio walkthroughs, behavioral inquiries, and design philosophy questions. The interviewers want to understand not only your final visual outputs but also the strategic thinking, user research, and cross-functional collaboration that informed your design decisions.

The following questions are representative of what candidates face during the loop, grouped by key evaluation categories.

Portfolio & Case Studies

This category is the most heavily weighted part of the evaluation process, focusing on your past work, design methodology, and execution.

• Walk me through a complex design project in your portfolio where you had to balance user needs with strict business or technical constraints.

Preparing for an interview at People requires a strategic focus on your portfolio and a clear understanding of how design operates within a high-traffic media environment. You should treat your portfolio not just as a collection of pretty screens, but as a series of compelling problem-solving narratives.

The hiring team evaluates candidates across several core criteria to ensure they can thrive in this unique environment.

Portfolio Craftsmanship – Your portfolio must demonstrate a high level of visual polish, strong typography, layout hierarchy, and clean execution. Interviewers look for clean design systems, smart use of whitespace, and a deep understanding of mobile-first responsive design.

Product & Business Thinking – You must show that you design with business goals in mind. Be ready to discuss how your designs impact metrics like user engagement, ad viewability, page load times, and subscription conversions.

Collaboration & Communication – Designers at People do not work in silos. You must demonstrate how you partner with product managers to define requirements, and how you collaborate with engineers to ensure your designs are implemented accurately.

Adaptability & Autonomy – Because teams can be lean and roles can sometimes overlap, the hiring team values designers who are self-starters. You should show that you can navigate ambiguity, drive projects forward independently, and adapt to shifting priorities.

The interview process for a UX/UI Designer at People is structured to evaluate both your practical design capabilities and your cultural fit within the product organization. While the process is designed to be thorough, candidates should be prepared for potential variations in the length and structure of the loop depending on the specific product team and seniority of the role.

Typically, the process begins with a casual introductory call with a recruiter or HR representative to discuss your background, career goals, and interest in the company. If there is mutual alignment, you will move on to a technical screening video call with the hiring manager or an Associate Director of Design. This round is generally conversational, focusing on your past experiences, design philosophy, and a high-level review of your portfolio.

For candidates who advance, the subsequent stages involve deep-dive portfolio presentations to design leads and cross-functional stakeholders. In some cases, the process may also include a practical design test or take-home assignment to evaluate your hands-on execution skills under constraints, followed by final-round virtual or in-person interviews.

The timeline above outlines the standard progression of the interview loop from the initial touchpoint to the final decision. Candidates should use this visualization to pace their preparation, ensuring they allocate ample time to refine their portfolio presentations before the deep-dive rounds. Keep in mind that some tracks may move faster or require additional design exercises depending on the specific team's hiring urgency.

To stand out in the interview loop, you must understand the specific competencies the interviewers are probing during each stage. The evaluation is structured around three core pillars.

Portfolio Presentation

The portfolio presentation is the single most critical component of the UX/UI Designer interview at People. Interviewers are not just looking at the final UI mockups; they want to see your end-to-end design process, your problem-solving methodology, and your ability to articulate the "why" behind your design decisions.

Be ready to go over:

• Problem Definition – How you identified the user pain point or business opportunity and framed the design challenge.
• User Research & Insights – The qualitative or quantitative research methods you used to gather insights, and how those insights directly shaped your design direction.
• Iteration & Exploration – Showing your intermediate work, including wireframes, user flows, and discarded design directions, to demonstrate how you arrived at the final solution.
• Impact & Metrics – The tangible results of your design, using data and user feedback to prove that your solution successfully solved the initial problem.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Integrating complex monetization strategies (like high-impact ad units) into a clean content layout without degrading the user experience.

Example scenarios:

• "Walk us through a project where you had to redesign an existing high-traffic page to improve user engagement while maintaining strict ad placement requirements."
• "Show us a case study where you had to design a complex, multi-step user flow, such as a subscription checkout or interactive quiz, and explain how you optimized the conversion funnel."

Design Execution & Take-Home Task

If your track includes a design test or take-home assignment, the goal is to evaluate your hands-on UI/UX skills, your speed, and your attention to detail under realistic constraints. The team wants to see how you apply established design patterns to a novel problem.

Be ready to go over:

• Visual Hierarchy & Typography – Creating layouts that are highly readable, scannable, and visually engaging, particularly for text-heavy editorial content.
• Component Design & Systems – Utilizing consistent UI elements, buttons, inputs, and card layouts that align with modern design system practices.
• Prototyping & Interaction – Demonstrating how the user flows through the experience, including micro-interactions, transitions, and state changes (e.g., hover, active, error states).
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Designing with performance budgets in mind, ensuring your visual assets and layouts do not negatively impact mobile page-load speeds.

Example scenarios:

• "Given a raw editorial article and three distinct ad placements, design a responsive mobile web layout that maximizes readability while ensuring high ad viewability."
• "Design a new interactive feature for the People homepage that encourages users to discover and bookmark trending celebrity news stories."

Behavioral & Cross-Functional Alignment

This evaluation area focuses on your interpersonal skills, your ability to collaborate with non-designers, and how you handle the realities of working in a fast-paced, sometimes ambiguous media environment.

Be ready to go over:

• Stakeholder Management – How you communicate design value, present your work to executives, and negotiate trade-offs with product and engineering.
• Handling Ambiguity – Demonstrating resilience and resourcefulness when project requirements are vague or change rapidly.
• Engineering Collaboration – How you prepare your design files for handoff, write specifications, and conduct design QA to ensure high-fidelity implementation.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – How you advocate for user-centric design practices in an organization where business goals (like ad revenue) often carry significant weight.

Example scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time when an engineer told you that your proposed design was too difficult or time-consuming to build. How did you collaborate to find a compromise?"
• "Describe a situation where a high-level stakeholder requested a design change that you felt would harm the user experience. How did you handle that conversation?"