Product design question
Design a phone for deaf people.
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Accessibility-first hardware/software design, requiring the candidate to rethink core phone interactions (calls, alerts) around non-auditory channels.
How to approach it
- Identify the core problem: a standard phone's primary interactions, calls and audio alerts, are inaccessible without hearing.
- Redesign the core communication mode: prioritize video calling with real-time captions and sign-language-friendly framing as the default communication method, not voice calls.
- Redesign alerts: strong visual (flashing) and haptic (vibration pattern) notifications distinct enough to convey urgency or type of alert without sound.
- Add a real-time captioning layer for any audio content the user encounters, like voicemail transcription or ambient sound awareness (e.g. a doorbell or siren detected via the phone's microphone and shown visually).
- Define success as call-completion rate via video/caption-based communication and response time to visual/haptic alerts versus a hearing-user baseline.
What a strong answer includes
- Redesigns the core communication paradigm around video and captions instead of just adding accessibility settings to a voice-first phone.
- Adds ambient-sound-awareness as a genuinely useful, non-obvious feature (translating real-world sounds into visual alerts).
- Benchmarks success against a hearing-user baseline, giving a concrete way to know if the design closes the gap.
Common mistakes
- Treating this as 'add captions to a normal phone' rather than redesigning the core interaction model around non-auditory channels.
- Ignoring ambient/environmental sound awareness, a real safety gap for deaf users beyond just phone calls.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle emergency calls, which usually assume voice communication?
- How would you test this with actual deaf users before shipping?
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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