Scenario Based Interview Questions

What is being tested

Scenario questions have no memorised answer. The interviewer is watching how you think: whether you ask clarifying questions, whether you consider trade offs, and whether you have actually shipped anything.

A good answer usually has four parts: clarify, decide, justify, name the trade off.

Questions only.

Design and implementation decisions

1. A designer gives you a card that should be entirely clickable. It contains a title, an image, a description and a tag link. How do you mark it up?
2. You need a component that shows and hides content. The team wants it animated. What do you build, and what do you push back on?
3. A page has a form with thirty fields. The completion rate is low. What do you change?
4. The design has light grey placeholder text as the only label. What do you do, and how do you have that conversation with the designer?
5. You need a dropdown menu. The design shows it opening on hover. What do you say?
6. A product manager asks for a modal that appears on page load offering a discount. What are your concerns?
7. You have to display a comparison of three plans across fifteen features. Table or something else? Justify it.
8. The team wants an infinite scrolling article index. What do you build and what do you keep alongside it?

Problems in production

9. A page works on your machine and is broken on the server. Give five things you would check, in order.
10. Traffic to a section of the site drops to nothing overnight. Walk me through diagnosing it.
11. A client says the site is slow on their phone but fast on yours. What do you do?
12. An accessibility audit comes back with sixty issues across the site. How do you prioritise?
13. A form works for most people but a few users report it doing nothing. How do you investigate?
14. The page jumps around while loading. What are the likely causes and how do you confirm each?
15. Search results show your page title as something you did not write. Why might that be?
16. A page appears in search with no description and a note saying no information is available. What happened?

Trade offs and judgement

17. You are three days from launch and an accessibility audit finds problems that will take a week. What do you do?
18. The marketing team wants six third party tracking scripts added. How do you respond?
19. A junior colleague submits a pull request that builds an interface entirely from divs. How do you review it?
20. Your team is choosing between server rendering and client rendering for a content site. What is your position and why?

How to answer

Clarify first

Almost every scenario is underspecified on purpose. Asking who is this for, what does it need to do without JavaScript, is this content or an application shows more than an immediate answer does.

Give a position

Interviewers are not looking for someone who sees every side and commits to nothing. Say what you would do.

Justify with a consequence

Not because it is best practice. Because otherwise a keyboard user cannot reach it, or otherwise the reader downloads two megabytes on mobile data.

Name the trade off

Every real decision costs something. Saying what it costs shows you have made the decision before rather than read about it.

Tell a story if you have one

We hit this on a project last year, and what we found was... is the strongest possible answer, and it cannot be faked.

Preparing your stories

Have three or four of these ready, each in under two minutes:

• A bug that took a long time to find, and how you eventually found it.
• A time you disagreed with a design or a requirement, and what happened.
• Something you made significantly faster or more accessible, with numbers.
• A mistake you made in production and what you changed afterwards.

The last one is asked more often than people expect, and a candidate who cannot name a mistake reads as either inexperienced or not paying attention.

Practice

1. Answer five scenarios out loud, timing yourself. Two minutes each.
2. For each, write down the clarifying question you would ask first.
3. Prepare the four stories above and practise each until it is under two minutes.
4. Have someone push back on your answers and practise defending or revising them.