Product design question
How would you design Google Images?
- Product design
- Medium
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Product design for a foundational, high-scale utility: can you identify a real search-quality or discovery gap rather than proposing surface-level UI changes.
How to approach it
- Define the user job: quickly find a specific, relevant, and appropriately licensed image for a given need (reference, inspiration, or reuse).
- Identify pain points: difficulty filtering by usage rights/licensing, results cluttered with low-quality or duplicate images, and weak support for descriptive, natural-language queries.
- Propose a fix: stronger, more prominent usage-rights filtering upfront, and improved natural-language query understanding (e.g. 'red shoes on a wooden table').
- Consider a visual-similarity search improvement: better 'search by this image' results, since visual matching is often weaker than desired.
- Address quality: better duplicate and low-quality image demotion in ranking.
- Define success: click-through and satisfaction rate on top results, and reduction in repeated/refined searches (a proxy for failed first search).
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies licensing/usage-rights clarity as a real, underserved pain point specific to image search, not generic search improvements.
- Proposes concrete natural-language query improvements, reflecting how users actually search for images versus keyword-only queries.
- Addresses duplicate/low-quality result clutter, a known real frustration with image search results.
- Uses re-search rate as a smart proxy metric for search failure, rather than only click-through rate.
Common mistakes
- Proposing generic UI redesign ideas (bigger thumbnails, new layout) instead of addressing real search-quality gaps.
- Ignoring the specific challenge of licensing/usage rights, which is unique to image search versus web search.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you measure whether users are actually finding what they need versus giving up?
- How would you handle copyrighted images appearing in results?
More product design questions
- Design a TV for a car.Google · Product design · Hard
- Design a refrigerator for the blind.Google · Product design · Hard
- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- 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
More questions from Google
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