Product design question
Design a microwave oven that could be used by everyone in the house. Â
- 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
Universal design thinking: can the candidate design one product that serves users with very different needs, ages, and abilities.
How to approach it
- Identify the range of users: young children, elderly family members, and users with limited vision or dexterity, all sharing one appliance.
- Name pain points: tiny unreadable buttons, complex multi-step programming, and safety risks for children operating it unsupervised.
- Design for simplicity: large tactile buttons with high contrast labels, voice guidance for setting time, and preset buttons for common foods.
- Add safety features: a child lock mode and automatic shutoff if the door is not sealed properly.
- Prioritize the preset and voice options first, since they solve the biggest pain point (complexity) for the widest group.
- Define success as reduced user error rate (wrong time or power settings) and satisfaction across age groups in testing.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses presets (popcorn, reheat, defrost) as the primary interface instead of manual time and power entry, which serves most users' real jobs to be done.
- Adds a child lock as a distinct safety feature rather than assuming complexity alone deters children.
- Tests across age groups explicitly, since a design that works for a 30 year old may fail for an 8 or 80 year old.
Common mistakes
- Designing for the average user and ignoring users at the extremes of ability.
- Adding too many features that increase complexity instead of reducing it.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you test this design across such different age groups?
- What would you cut if you had to ship a simpler first version?
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