Product design question
Design an app like WhatsApp for the blind.
- Meta
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Tests accessible product design for a fundamentally visual and text-based communication paradigm, requiring a genuinely different interaction model, not just screen-reader compatibility.
How to approach it
- Clarify the user: fully blind users who rely on screen readers or dedicated non-visual interaction, communicating primarily via voice and audio cues.
- Identify pain points with standard messaging apps: typing text is slow and error-prone via screen reader, and visually scanning chat history is impossible without full audio playback.
- Identify the core job: send and receive messages quickly and privately, with audio as the primary interaction mode rather than an accessibility layer bolted onto a visual app.
- Propose a voice-first design: voice-to-text composition with a fast confirm-by-listening-back flow, and messages primarily delivered as spoken audio rather than requiring text reading.
- Address efficient navigation: audio-based conversation list browsing, like a swipe gesture announcing recent senders, avoiding the need to visually scan a full chat list.
- Define success: message send and receive completion time compared to a sighted user on a standard app, and task-completion rate for starting a new conversation.
What a strong answer includes
- Rejects a bolt-on screen-reader-compatible-visual-app approach and designs voice as the primary mode, not an accessibility fallback.
- Names a specific, real interaction pattern, gesture-based audio conversation browsing, rather than a vague accessibility statement.
- Addresses the genuine friction of text-based messaging for screen-reader users, showing real understanding of blind user workflows.
- Defines success with a comparative usability metric against sighted users, grounding the answer in real, testable outcomes.
Common mistakes
- Treating this as a standard messaging app with a screen reader label added, rather than a fundamentally voice-first redesign.
- Ignoring privacy concerns of audio-based messaging, like messages read aloud in public settings.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you address the privacy risk of messages being read aloud in public?
- How would you handle a mixed conversation between a blind and a sighted user?
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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