Product design question
Design a task assignment form for an app.
- Microsoft
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Tests detailed UX and form design thinking for a common but easy-to-get-wrong workflow tool, focused on completion rate and clarity.
How to approach it
- Clarify the context: who creates tasks (a manager or any team member) and who they're assigned to, since permissions and defaults depend on this.
- Design the required fields minimally: task title, assignee, and due date as the only required fields, with description, priority, and tags as optional/expandable to reduce upfront friction.
- Design smart defaults: pre-fill the assignee field with recently assigned teammates and suggest a due date based on typical task type, to speed up repetitive task creation.
- Design for mobile and quick-entry use cases: a minimal 'quick add' mode (just title and assignee) alongside a full detailed form for more complex tasks.
- Define success: form completion rate (started versus submitted) and average time-to-submit, since a good task form should be fast, not just complete.
What a strong answer includes
- Minimizes required fields deliberately, recognizing that form abandonment is usually driven by unnecessary friction, not by a lack of features.
- Proposes a quick-add mode alongside a detailed mode, addressing both casual fast task creation and more complex planning needs.
- Uses an illustrative number, e.g. assume forms with more than 4 required fields see 30% higher abandonment, to justify the minimal-fields design choice.
- Picks completion rate and time-to-submit as success metrics, directly tied to the form-design goal, not just general app engagement.
Common mistakes
- Designing a form with many required fields upfront without considering the friction cost to completion rate.
- Ignoring the difference between quick, casual task entry and detailed task planning, which need different flows.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you design for recurring or templated tasks to reduce repetitive data entry?
- How would you measure whether the smart defaults actually save users time versus just adding clutter?
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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