Have an interview today with Shipt. On demand grocery delivery. Bought by Target for $600M

Have an interview today with Shipt. On demand grocery delivery. Bought by Target for $600M
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#1

Hello all,

I’ve been here for a little bit, working through FreeCodeCamp’s resources. I had a recruiter reach out to me on LinkedIn a few days ago wanting to interview me for a few positions they have open currently. I am not sure which position, but I am really interested in their UI/UX Developer position.

In order to prepare for the interview, and show them a little of what I can do I re-developed their landing page, on desktop and mobile, and even noted a few bugs I noticed for their website.

Here is the pen I put together. Best to view on Desktop, because I wanted to model it like a program like Sketch App would do, with various layouts side by side.

Any feedback I receive before the interview would be greatly appreciated!

Shipt Landing Page

#2

I had a look at their original page and it looks really good from a design point of view. Your Codepen looks nice but I think it moves away from what the company is focusing on displaying to their customers at the moment.

From their original website, they are clearly focusing on green and a lot of white and whitespace. You are using some greys and gradients that might be taking away from the modern, simple look they seem to be looking for.

There’s also a lot of produce and people. They want to showcase fresh products and a personable approach where you can talk to your delivery person. This is quite normal for companies that work mainly with online shopping. The idea of the lemons is good but I think for their business image they might be looking for images with more produce and people on them.

I assume (without any experience in UX/UI) that companies do want you to innovate on their websites but more than that they want to see that you understand their business idea, what they want to sell and who they want to sell it too.
I assume your page is more like a wireframe than a functional page, I guess it is more graphic design oriented than a web page.
Again, your Codepen looks great but it will definitely be compared to what they already have, which is a pretty nice website already.

Maybe also working on their website and solving the problems in it that you’ve found could be a great way to present your development skills and prove you’re a problem solver.

Hope it helps, good luck with your interview!

#3

Thanks for the great feedback. I just think the current page looks a little dated. Most modern website from what I have seen are moving away from the full page landing image. Just looks a little old to me. But I guess it’s just a matter of opinion at this point haha. Yea it is definately just a wire frame. Didn’t mean for it to be functional. I didn’t even include any JS at this point. Just focusing on the interface

#4

I’m bracing for ASTV99 to murder me. He has been typing for hours and he always leaves novels. lol

#5

At this point, from your feedback, i’m considering just abandoning this idea, and not showing them. Don’t want them to think I don’t understand their audience. I have a strong business background, which is the field I am trying to transition from. Just wanted to show them something I can create for them or how I can help them, but it may not be a good idea after all.

#6

There might definetely be things to improve on their own page. I think they used the huge pic because they wanted to transmit warmth and approachability, which is dificult to do when you try to attract customers online. I don’t know that much of design truthfully but maybe it is a bit outdated.
What it does feel is a bit ‘start-up’. Many websites seem to have a similar white minimalistic look so maybe giving them new ideas of how to diferentiate themselves from their compettitors.

it does seem like a big company now so if I was you I’d take their website and download it, tweak it until it looks more personalized and with the bugs fixed. Big companies seem to be very reluctant to big changes on their websites because they invested so much on them they might think they are perfect. But you might impress them if you can show them their own website improved.

#7

True! Dang man, I wish I posted this yesterday I would have done so. I only have a few hours and I am currently at my FT job so I don’t have time to do so. Maybe before the next (hopefully : ) )

#8

Yea, that is a long answer from astv99 hehe.

I’m sure they will appreciate anything you can do working on their ideas, definitely show it to them. Most people might just show up, showing commitment and some work on the brand might be all they need to hire you.

#9

That’s all I was hoping for, just to show them I WANT to do this type of work. Thanks man for the kind words.

#11

Nice job, and looks good. But where’s the mobile version you mentioned? The CodePen isn’t responsive at all, and when I tried it on my phone, it was still being served up desktop-sized.

There are some things I noticed that aren’t ideal from both the UX and development perspective:

  • Shipt’s website is fully responsive all the way from 1900x1200 down to the narrowest browser window that I could make (it expands and shrinks/re-organizes appropriately), while yours isn’t—so you might want to make yours fully responsive as well.
  • There’s still a horizontal scrollbar in the browser at 1900x1200 on my computer even when the browser is fully maximized on screen, so there must be some sort of margin/padding issue somewhere.
  • I noticed that you deviated from some of the colors and fonts as seen on Shipt’s site. That may not be a good thing, and even for just a “mock” re-design such as yours, not all companies will necessarily like that—some companies, especially larger and more established ones, will want to see that you can work from a given design spec (i.e., a designer may give you a Photoshop PSD file to work from). Also, some companies put an extraordinary amount of time & effort into their style guide, and may not appreciate deviations from that style guide.
  • You should always pay attention to what’s visible in the immediate browser viewport, and partially showing anything isn’t often a good aesthetic choice.

In terms of coding, etc:

  • If you’re going to take the time to code by hand from scratch, your indentation should be 100% clean & consistent all the way through.
  • Long lines of code aren’t exactly manageable or readable (i.e., line 59) and you might want to consider breaking long lines so that anyone looking at your code won’t have to horizontally scroll too far, if at all. I recommend breaking lines for maintainability/readability after about 100 characters or so.
  • Always double-check your code through both the W3C Validator and Google PageSpeed Insights. The Validator is reporting some errors, and although your raw scores on PageSpeed Insights are good, having anything close to 1MB of resources is definitely too much for mobile.

Interview prep:

  • If you only have a few hours to prepare for your interview, I’d recommend taking the time to research the position and the company if you haven’t already. Look the company up on Glassdoor and LinkedIn (you can see if you might have any 2nd-degree connections that might either work there or might otherwise be connected to the company), read about their history, see if they’ve been in the news recently (there’s a CNBC News article from March 29 that I’d recommend reading). For the position, it probably mentions the tech stack they use, so prepare a few questions (and any answers to questions you think you might be asked) about that. And prepare some questions of course, since every interviewer will always ask about that.

Speaking of WordPress:

  • A company using WordPress just means that they’re trying to save money and not unnecessarily invest into extra tech that they don’t need. WordPress is part of cPanel, which is a standard hosting feature on many web hosts. This also means that if you know PHP, you could play that up, since WordPress is based on PHP.

Btw, I laughed at your post above where you mentioned me—apparently my reputation for long posts precedes me! :stuck_out_tongue:

#12

Ha thanks for the feedback! I was honestly scared when I saw your replying because you murdered my portfolio page and made me feel like a dev pleb haha. But it was good feedback and helped shape my portfolio where it is today.

As far as responsiveness, I knew it wasn’t going to be responsive on mobile, which is why I said please view it on desktop, because I wanted it to be more like a Sketch App presentation to show different layouts. I changed the font because it looked to fat and clunky and didn’t seem like it represented their brand very well, but I am aware a developer doesn’t handle that, the marketing/design team would do so and I would be just their code monkey haha.

Yea the indentation on codepen is sketchy, the windows shrinking and small dev space makes it hard to maintain consistency.

They are actually a local company, started here in Bham, AL but have expanded to San Fran, which is where I am interviewing. I am trying to escape the south and move to more opportunities.

Wordpress just seems so… blah and not unique. Maybe larger CMS. But still blah.

Thanks again man!

#13

Sure no problem, and good luck with the interview!

#14

Thanks man. I’ll let you know how it goes

#15

Andddd they bumped my interview to next week. A whole 7 days away. bummer : /

#16

I think your layout is pretty nice. If it was my interview, I would just copy the source code of the site and fix the bugs you found instead of just mentioning it. This could show a lot of initiative.

On a side note:
You have any previous professional experience with development/UI/UX other than what you learned here? I myself feel pretty confident with front end styling and what not but do not know when I should start applying haha. I currently work in help desk :confused:

#17

I think one of the best quotes I have read on here about when to apply is “When the time comes that you think you should start applying, you should’ve been applying a long time ago”. I have been following that and applying as often as possible. Someone will take a shot with me eventually, just have to be patient.

Yea that’s a good idea, I will see what I can come up with in regards to fixing their source code.

#18

That is a very good point. I actually know someone that got hired after 3 months of starting to learn development (about where I am at) but he was super lucky . Good luck with your interview man!

#19

I think one of the best quotes I have read on here about when to apply is “When the time comes that you think you should start applying, you should’ve been applying a long time ago”. I have been following that and applying as often as possible. Someone will take a shot with me eventually, just have to be patient.

That is a great attitude. Keep it up and it will serve you well. As for them pushing the interview back, they just gave you 7 days to prepare. Take the advice you’ve received here and run with it. You can do it.

#20

Thanks man I appreciate it!