Accessible Phone Design for Users With No Usable Vision
Company: Meta
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
How would you design a smartphone for people who are blind?
```hint Choose whose day you are designing
Blind users differ in when they lost their sight, whether they read Braille, and how comfortable they already are with today's phones. Pick one group and work from the tasks that fill its day.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does "blind" mean no usable vision only, or should the design also serve people with low vision?
- Are we designing the hardware and operating system of a new device, or would an accessibility layer on existing phones count?
- Which market is this for first, and is there a target price?
- Is success measured by new customers for the company, by greater independence for blind users, or both?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal and a chosen segment of blind users, with the reason that segment comes first
- Pain points drawn from that segment's daily tasks, measured against what mainstream phones with screen readers already do
- Concrete hardware, interaction and software features, prioritized with stated criteria into an MVP
- Success metrics and guardrails, and how the design is tested with blind users
- Risks such as AI errors, privacy, cost and stigma, and how each is handled
### Follow-up Questions
- Mainstream phones already include screen readers. Why build a dedicated device instead of improving those, and what evidence would change your mind?
- What would you cut to keep the price close to a mainstream mid-range phone?
- How would you run the first usability study with blind participants, and what would you measure?
Overview: Product design question for Meta product manager interviews: design a smartphone for people who are blind. It tests choosing a segment of blind users, grounding pain points in daily tasks, prioritizing hardware and software ideas against existing screen readers, and defining success metrics.