Product design question
how would you improve google map for the elderly?
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Accessibility-focused product design, requiring you to identify specific barriers rather than assuming a generic simplification helps.
How to approach it
- Users: elderly users, who may face smaller text readability issues, less familiarity with gestures, and anxiety about getting lost or making mistakes.
- Pain points: small tap targets and text, complex multi-step gesture navigation, and unclear guidance when a wrong turn happens.
- Prioritize: focus on the highest-anxiety moment, real time navigation guidance and recovery from a missed turn, over cosmetic changes.
- Solution: a simplified, high-contrast mode with larger text and voice-guided turn by turn directions with more frequent, clearer prompts.
- Address trust: add an easy way to share live location with a family member for reassurance during unfamiliar trips.
- Success metric: task completion rate for reaching a destination without external help, and reduction in reported navigation errors among the elderly user segment.
What a strong answer includes
- Identifies the real friction points specific to elderly users, small targets, gesture unfamiliarity, and anxiety about errors, rather than a generic accessibility statement.
- Proposes a concrete high-value feature, more frequent clear voice prompts and easy family location sharing, addressing both usability and emotional reassurance.
- Sets a segment-specific success metric, task completion without external help, directly tied to the identified pain point.
Common mistakes
- Proposing only a generic larger font size fix without addressing navigation confidence and recovery from mistakes.
- No consideration of the emotional or trust dimension, like anxiety about getting lost.
- Vague success metric with no segmentation for the elderly user group specifically.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you test this with actual elderly users rather than assuming their needs?
- What would you prioritize first if you could only ship one change?
More product design questions
- How would you improve Outlook for the use case when people get overwhelmed by number of emails received after returning from a vacation?Microsoft · Product design · Medium
- You’ve just joined Meta and have been tasked with launching a new product to help people at home during emergencies. What would you build?Meta · Product design · Medium
- How do you design a camera for the elderly?Google · Product design · Medium
- Design a new feature for Twitter that improves the new user’s experience.Twitter · Product design · Medium
- How would you go about designing a new location sharing app for Google?Google · Product design · Medium
- How do you design an app for on-demand beauty services?Product design · Medium
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