Product design question
Design a TV for a car.
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What this question tests
Tests product design under real physical and safety constraints (a moving vehicle), forcing trade-offs between passenger entertainment and driver safety.
How to approach it
- Clarify the use case: entertainment for passengers (rear seats) versus any driver-facing display, since driver distraction has legal and safety limits.
- Identify users: back-seat passengers on long trips, most commonly families with children, and rideshare/robotaxi passengers.
- Identify pain points: boredom on long drives, motion sickness from screens, and limited content options offline.
- Propose design: rear-seat-only screens with automatic lockout from the driver's view, content that adapts to trip length (auto-detected via navigation), and motion-sickness-aware UI (larger text, horizon-stabilized visuals, or audio-first mode).
- Address safety: hard rule that any front-facing display disables video during motion, showing only safety-relevant info to the driver.
- Define success: reduction in 'are we there yet' complaints via parent surveys, and screen engagement time on trips over 30 minutes.
What a strong answer includes
- Draws a hard, explicit safety line between driver-facing and passenger-facing displays instead of treating the car as one generic screen surface.
- Addresses motion sickness specifically, a real and common issue with in-car screens, with concrete UI mitigations.
- Ties content and UI to trip context (auto-detected trip length via navigation) rather than a static video player.
- Names a realistic success metric tied to the actual job (long trip boredom) rather than generic screen-time maximization.
Common mistakes
- Ignoring driver distraction and safety regulations entirely.
- Not addressing motion sickness, a well-known problem with in-car video for many passengers.
- Designing one screen experience for all seat positions and trip types.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would this differ for a robotaxi with no human driver?
- How would you handle offline content for areas with no connectivity?
- What regulations would constrain where and when screens can be active?
More product design questions
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- Redesign Twitter for eCommerce.Shopify · Product design · Hard
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How would you improve Google Home?Google · Product design · Easy
- How would you improve YouTube?Spotify · Product design · Easy
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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