Why Every UI UX Designer Should Practice Explaining Their Notebook Aloud

Interview Insights · UI UX Designer

Why Every UI UX Designer Should Practice Explaining Their Notebook Aloud

SECTION 01What a UI UX notebook is, and why interviewers care about it

For a developer, a notebook usually means a Jupyter file. For a UI UX designer, I read it as the working record of your design thinking. It can be a paper sketchbook, a Notion page, a FigJam board or a Google Doc. What matters is that it holds the raw material: what users said, what they did, which screens you sketched and why you dropped some of them.

When I interview a designer, the polished Figma file tells me what they made. The notebook tells me how they got there. If a candidate can open their notes and say 'this is where I noticed people kept scrolling past the price', I learn that the design came from evidence and not from a Dribbble shot. That is the difference between a decorator and a designer.

Day 3 - testing

- users didn't like checkout
- confusing
- need better UI
- make it modern

(No participant, no task, no behaviour, no decision.
In an interview this gives you nothing to say.)

Day 3 - checkout usability test, 5 participants
Task: apply a coupon and pay

P1: scrolled up and down twice, asked 'where do I put the code?'
P3: found coupon field only after tapping 'Order summary'
P4: gave up on coupon, paid full price

Pattern: coupon field hidden inside a collapsed summary.
Idea A: expand summary by default  -> too long on small phones
Idea B: coupon link above total    -> chosen, test on Friday

Open question: does a visible coupon field make people
leave to search for codes? Check drop-off after release.

The strong entry is not longer because the designer likes writing. It is longer because every line can become a sentence in an interview. Participant labels, the task, the behaviour, two ideas and one open question: that is a complete answer waiting to be spoken.

SECTION 02Why reading your notes silently is not enough

Many designers keep good notes and still give weak answers. The reason is simple: writing and speaking are different skills. Notes are written in fragments, with shorthand only you understand. When you try to turn them into speech for the first time in front of an interviewer, you either read them line by line or you jump straight to the final design and skip the reasoning.

Speaking your notebook aloud before the interview forces you to translate fragments into sentences, put them in order and cut what does not matter. You also discover gaps. Many candidates realise mid-practice that they never wrote down why they picked one layout over another, and it is far better to find that at home than in the room.

Interviewer: How did you decide to move the coupon field?

Candidate: So, um, we did testing and, let me check...
yes, P1 was confused, P3 also, and then I thought
it should be visible, so I made it visible.
It looks cleaner now.

Interviewer: How did you decide to move the coupon field?

Candidate: In our checkout test, three of five people
could not find the coupon field because it sat inside a
collapsed order summary. One person gave up and paid full price.

I tried two fixes. Expanding the summary by default made the
page too long on small phones, so I dropped it. A small
'Have a coupon?' link above the total solved the visibility
problem without adding length. The open risk is that people
leave to hunt for codes, so I suggested tracking drop-off.

The practised answer uses the same notebook. Nothing new was invented. The only difference is that the candidate has already said it out loud a few times and knows which line comes first.

SECTION 03A spoken structure for walking through your notebook

You need a repeatable order so you never ramble. I suggest four beats, and they map directly onto a good notebook page. Context: who you tested with and what task you gave. Observation: what you saw, in plain behaviour terms. Decision: what you changed and what you rejected. Next: what you still do not know and how you would find out.

This order works because it mirrors how a hiring manager thinks about design risk. They want to know the evidence is real, the decision follows from the evidence, and you are honest about uncertainty. Keep each beat to two or three sentences and the whole answer stays under two minutes.

NOTEBOOK WALK-THROUGH CARD

CONTEXT     who / how many / what task / which method
OBSERVATION what they DID (not what they felt)
            one direct quote if you have it
DECISION    option chosen + option rejected + reason
NEXT        one open question + how to test it

Time check: 20s + 30s + 40s + 20s = under 2 minutes

CONTEXT: Unmoderated test, six new users of a budgeting app,
task was 'add your first expense'.

OBSERVATION: Four skipped the five-screen tutorial and then
could not find the add button, which sat in a bottom sheet.

DECISION: I cut the tutorial to two screens and placed a
floating add button on the home screen. I rejected a
tooltip tour because users in the test closed pop-ups fast.

NEXT: I want to see if the floating button covers content
on smaller screens, so I would test on a budget phone.

Use the card for every project you plan to discuss. If any beat is empty, go back to your notebook. If the notebook is empty too, that is a sign you need to run a small test before your interview rather than invent one.

SECTION 04Notebook rehearsal worksheet for UI UX interviews

Use these three tools in the week before your interview. The first cleans up your notebook so it is explainable. The second is a recording drill. The third is a checklist of follow-up questions interviewers ask about research notes.

NOTEBOOK CLEAN-UP (one evening)

For each project you will discuss:
[ ] Label every participant (P1, P2...) with role or context
[ ] Write the task you gave them in one line
[ ] Circle behaviour notes, cross out pure opinions
[ ] Group repeated observations into 3 to 5 patterns
[ ] Under each pattern, write the design change it caused
[ ] Add one rejected idea per change, with the reason
[ ] Write one open question you never answered

Do NOT rewrite history. If you did not test something,
mark it as an assumption.

RECORDING DRILL (15 minutes per project)

1. Open one notebook page. Read it once.
2. Close it. Start a voice recording.
3. Explain the page using Context-Observation-Decision-Next.
4. Stop at 2 minutes, finished or not.
5. Play back and mark:
   - Did I lead with behaviour, not opinion?
   - Did I name a rejected option?
   - Did I use any shorthand an outsider would not know?
6. Record again. Compare the two versions.

QUESTIONS INTERVIEWERS ASK ABOUT YOUR NOTES

- How many people did you speak to, and how did you find them?
- Was this moderated or unmoderated?
- What did you see that surprised you?
- Which note made you change the design the most?
- What did a user say that you disagreed with?
- How did you separate what users said from what they did?
- What would you do differently in the next round?

Prepare a two-sentence answer for each, from your own notes.

SECTION 05Habits that make your notebook easy to talk about

A notebook that is easy to explain is usually a notebook that was kept well from day one. These habits help with both.

• Write behaviour first — Note what the user did before you note what you think it means. 'Tapped back twice' is evidence; 'was confused' is an interpretation.
• Date and label every session — A date, a participant label and a task name let you reconstruct the story months later when an interviewer asks.
• Keep the ideas you killed — Rejected sketches are the best proof that you explored. Draw a line through them instead of deleting them.
• End each page with a question — One open question per page keeps you honest and gives you a ready answer to 'what would you test next?'.
• Translate shorthand before interviews — Replace internal labels like 'PDP' or 'the blue card' with full terms when you speak, unless the interviewer uses them first.

SECTION 06Interview Q&A — UI UX notebook

SECTION 07Test yourself — UI UX notebook quiz

SECTION 08Frequently asked questions

SECTION 09Related reads