Product design question
Design a phone for someone who is visually impaired.
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Accessibility-first product design and the ability to prioritize features for a specific disability segment.
How to approach it
- Clarify scope: a new device, a mode on an existing phone, or software features, and confirm the target is low vision versus fully blind users.
- Identify core jobs to be done: making calls, reading messages, navigating, identifying objects and currency, and independent daily tasks.
- Map current pain points such as tiny touch targets, unlabeled icons, and visual-only notifications.
- Prioritize by frequency and severity, e.g. voice input and screen reader quality before rare features like color identification.
- Propose solutions like a robust screen reader, haptic and audio feedback, high contrast and large text modes, and voice first navigation.
- Define success metrics such as task completion rate and time on core tasks like sending a message, compared to sighted user baselines.
What a strong answer includes
- Groups the population correctly, low vision, color blind and fully blind users need different affordances, not one generic fix.
- Prioritizes software and interaction changes, screen reader quality and haptics, over novel hardware that is costly to ship.
- Cites a concrete task benchmark, e.g. reducing average time to compose a text message versus the current experience, marked as an assumption.
- References real prior art like VoiceOver style gestures to ground the design in something buildable.
Common mistakes
- Treating all visually impaired users as one homogeneous group.
- Overengineering hardware, like special buttons, instead of fixing software accessibility first.
- Skipping success metrics and just listing features.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you test this with actual visually impaired users.
- What tradeoffs would you make between cost and accessibility features.
- How would you prioritize this against mainstream feature requests.
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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