# Interview Strategies

**This-or-That Guided Choice**
Present two opposing directions and let the user pick. Common contrast pairs (each with real product references):
- Information Density: Linear vs Notion
- Color Temperature: Stripe vs Airbnb
- Formality: Bloomberg Terminal vs Figma
- Visual Hierarchy: Apple vs Vercel Dashboard
- Navigation Style: Slack vs Spotify
- Theme Preference: GitHub vs Google Docs
- Border Radius Style: iOS vs Windows
- Illustration Style: Dropbox vs No illustrations

**Brand Personification** — "If your product were a person, what style of clothes would they wear?"

**Negative Elimination** — "Is there a design style you immediately dislike?"

**Five-Second Test** — Gut reaction to a reference: "Does this feel right?"

**Concrete Probing** — "Premium" → Apple whitespace vs Hermes dark-gold vs Arc minimal-detailed

**Contradiction Detection** — Call out conflicts (e.g. "clean" + 20 metrics on one screen) and force trade-offs

**Priority Stacking** — "If you could only keep one, clean or information-complete?" Don't accept "both"

**Search Strategy** (Web-First):
1. User mentions reference product → Search latest design style
2. Recommend directions for competitors → Search current trends
3. Unsure about feature visual → Search mainstream patterns
4. Recommend color/style/layout → Verify feasibility
5. User asks "how does XX do it?" → Search before answering

**Confirmation Strategy** — Periodically repeat back; if insufficient when user says "enough", keep probing
