Front End System Design Interview - Applications
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Examples
- News feed (e.g. Facebook) (Free)
- Chat application (e.g. Messenger) (Paid)
- Pinterest (Paid)
- Collaborative editor (e.g. Google docs) (Paid)
- Video streaming (e.g. Netflix) (Paid)
- Design / drawing tool (e.g. Figma) (Paid)
- Music streaming (e.g. Spotify) (Paid)
- Video conferencing (e.g. Zoom) (Paid)
- Travel booking website (e.g. Airbnb) (Paid)
- E-commerce marketplace (e.g. Amazon) (Paid)
- Collaborative spreadsheet (e.g. Google Sheets) (Paid)
- Photo sharing application (e.g. Instagram) (Paid)
- Email client (e.g. Microsoft Outlook) (Paid)
Framework
In system design interviews, candidates are supposed to lead the conversation. Here's a framework you can use to give an outline to the interviewer as to what you are going to cover (not necessarily in that order). The framework is called RADIO and it is made up of the first character of each aspect.
- Requirements exploration
- Architecture
- Data model
- Interface definition (API)
- Optimizations and deep dive
- User experience (UX)
- Performance
- Accessibility (a11y)
- Internationalization (i18n)
- Multi-device support
- Security
Requirements exploration
Every system design interview should start with clarifying requirements about the question, which is usually left vague intentionally. Some considerations:
- What devices should the system support? Desktop web, mobile web, etc
- What's the primary device that users will access the system on?
- Which browsers should we support?
- Do we need to support internationalization?
- Does the app need to work offline?
Architecture / High-level design
Architecture for front end interviews are typically focused on the client-side architecture, and not on large scale distributed systems where databases, load balancers and servers are involved.
For applications, common architectures include Model-View-Controller, Model-View-ViewModel, Flux, N-tier (where data tier is on the client) etc.
Data model
Client app state, which is a combination of server state (database) and true client state (non-persisted to the server).
Interface definition (API)
API design for applications will refer to the HTTP/network API parameters and the shape of the responses.
Optimization and deep dives
With the architectural basics of the application covered, we can dive into specific areas which the application might need special attention to. Note that there almost definitely won't be enough time to cover every area, and not every area will be very relevant to the component at hand.
Showing knowledge about these areas and being able to dive deep into them are traits of senior developers.
- User experience (UX)
- Performance
- Accessibility (a11y)
- Internationalization (i18n)
- Multi-device support
- Security
Helpful articles
Many companies blog about their technical challenges in the front end domain and these are great content to learn more about designing front end systems.
- Building the Google Photos Web UI
- Twitter Lite and High Performance React Progressive Web Apps at Scale
- A Netflix Web Performance Case Study
- A Tinder Progressive Web App Performance Case Study
- A Pinterest Progressive Web App Performance Case Study
- A React And Preact Progressive Web App Performance Case Study: Treebo
- Rebuilding our tech stack for the new Facebook.com
GreatFrontEnd shows you how to approach front end system design interviews with their Front End System Design Playbook and case studies. You can also do hands-on practice through their huge question bank of 500+ questions, each with solutions written by ex-FAANG senior engineers to learn more about system design.