Product design question

Design a food allergies app.

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Product design for a safety-critical consumer app, requiring accuracy, trust, and clear failure handling given real health stakes.

Identify the user: people with food allergies (or parents of allergic children) who need reliable information when eating out or buying packaged food.
Name pain points: ingredient lists are often incomplete or hard to interpret quickly, and cross-contamination risk is invisible without direct communication with a restaurant or manufacturer.
Design core features: a personal allergy profile that flags risky ingredients in scanned packaged food labels or restaurant menu items, plus a direct messaging or call shortcut to confirm cross-contamination practices with a restaurant.
Prioritize accuracy and clear uncertainty communication over speed, since a false negative (missing an allergen) carries real health risk, unlike most consumer app mistakes.
Add a clear disclaimer and confidence indicator when data is incomplete, explicitly telling the user to verify directly rather than presenting uncertain information as fact.
Define success as user reported confidence in the information and, critically, a very low rate of missed allergen flags in testing.

Treats false negatives, a missed allergen, as the central design risk, unlike a typical consumer app where mistakes are just annoying.
Proposes a real mitigation for imperfect data, an explicit confidence indicator and 'verify directly' prompt, rather than presenting uncertain data as certain.
Adds a practical mechanism, a direct restaurant contact shortcut, addressing that some allergen risk (cross-contamination) simply cannot be solved by data alone.

Treating this like a typical consumer app where an occasional wrong answer is a minor issue rather than a health risk.
Presenting incomplete ingredient data with false confidence instead of clearly flagging uncertainty to the user.

How would you handle a restaurant with no available ingredient or allergen data at all?
How would you validate the accuracy of your allergen detection before trusting it with users' health?