Product design question
Design a photo sharing app for a visually impaired person.
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Accessibility-focused product sense for a fundamentally visual product category.
How to approach it
- Reframe around what value a visually impaired person gets from photos, e.g. participating in shared memories, not viewing images.
- Identify pain points: can't independently know what's in a photo, can't easily contribute their own, miss caption context.
- Propose AI-generated audio descriptions of photos and voice-based captioning and commenting.
- Propose haptic or audio cues when tagged in a photo.
- Prioritize AI photo description first, since it unlocks the core value of knowing what's shared.
- Define success as engagement rate with described photos or session time in the audio-description mode.
What a strong answer includes
- Reframes the problem around the underlying value, social connection via photos, rather than the literal visual act.
- Uses concrete, feasible technology, image-to-text description, as the core mechanism.
- Addresses both consuming and contributing sides of the experience.
- Picks an engagement metric specific to the accessibility feature, not generic app-wide metrics.
Common mistakes
- Getting stuck on the visual paradox instead of reframing toward the underlying social value.
- Proposing only a description feature without addressing how the user contributes their own photos.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you ensure AI-generated descriptions are accurate and not misleading?
- How would you test this with actual visually impaired users?
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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