Product design question
Design a fridge for a person in a wheelchair.
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Medium
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Accessibility-focused product design grounded in specific physical constraints and daily use patterns.
How to approach it
- Define the user: a wheelchair user whose reach height and approach angle differ from a standing user's.
- Identify pain points with standard fridges: high-mounted freezers, deep shelves requiring reach-in, and door swing blocking wheelchair approach.
- Prioritize reachability: lower and more accessible primary shelves, pull-out drawers instead of deep fixed shelves, and side-by-side rather than top freezer layout.
- Design door and control accessibility: lever handles instead of grips, and controls mounted at a lower, wheelchair-accessible height.
- Consider smart features as secondary, like voice-activated door unlock for convenience, but only after physical accessibility is solved.
- Define success metrics: successful reach rate for primary items and user-reported ease of use in testing.
What a strong answer includes
- Grounds design in specific ergonomic details, like reach height and door swing clearance, rather than generic 'accessible design.'
- Prioritizes physical layout changes (pull-out drawers, side-by-side doors) over smart features, correctly ranking impact.
- Gives a concrete example, e.g. lowering primary shelf height to within a seated reach zone, as a specific design decision.
- Recommends testing with actual wheelchair users rather than relying on assumed ergonomics.
Common mistakes
- Jumping to smart or voice features before solving basic physical reachability.
- Treating this as a cosmetic redesign instead of an ergonomic one.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you validate reach height assumptions with real users?
- What trade-offs would this design have for non-wheelchair users?
More product design questions
- How would you improve Outlook for the use case when people get overwhelmed by number of emails received after returning from a vacation?Microsoft · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Microsoft Teams?Microsoft · Product design · Easy
- Design a loyalty program for a search engine that's competing with Google & Bing.Google · Product design · Hard
- How would you improve Microsoft OneNote?Microsoft · Product design · Easy
- How would you improve the MS Teams search functionality as a Search PM at Microsoft Teams?Microsoft · Product design · Medium
- How would you design a car sharing platform like Uber for disabled people?Lyft · Product design · Hard
More questions from Microsoft
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop