Seattle Community Spotlight: Interview with Zoshua Colah
Zoshua’s Headshot
Can you provide a brief overview of your background?
I am currently a Senior Product Designer at Zesty.io, a content management system that empowers enterprise businesses to easily create, edit, and manage the content on their websites and apps. As their founding designer, I’ve been responsible for establishing a design culture and process at the organization that has resulted in us being able to design and deploy several usability improvements for critical customer-facing features.
Before joining Zesty.io, I worked as a Product Designer for Pathrise, an online mentorship program for job seekers in tech. At Pathrise, I led the design of their learning management system for two years, developing solutions to alleviate the challenges people face during their job search. Additionally, I mentored over 90 fellows, assisting them in securing positions at top companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Deloitte.
I also teach design and business analytics. In fact I've taught 3000+ students through my teaching engagements which have included positions at the University of Washington, Adobe, ISME (now Atlas University), Pathrise, DubsTech, Collearn, Coding with Kids, Let’s Level Up, and Great Learning.
I am also involved with DubsTech, a student organization at the University of Washington, where I have had the privilege of founding UX Library, a one step website for UX resources, and the Protothon, an online UX hackathon that has grown to become the largest of its kind, recently completing its 11th iteration.
How did you get started in the field of design?
Originally from Mumbai, India, my journey into design began in the 11th grade when I discovered Codrops, a website featuring beautifully animated website templates. Inspired to create similar designs, I initially felt that I needed a degree in computer science and joined the University of Washington for the same. However, within two weeks of attending college, I discovered the field of UX Design through a class taught by Brian Fling, a visiting faculty member. This discovery redirected my career path, and I have been dedicated to UX Design ever since.
Which experience that you mentioned before was a milestone or significant moment in your journey as a designer that has shaped your career?
My first UX Design class, "Mobile App and OS Design," taught by Brian Fling. The course required us to develop a comprehensive design system and design a new mobile operating system with 14 apps that would come preinstalled with it . Despite being the smallest and least experienced team, the iterative design process and high-quality critiques from Brian Fling were invaluable. I learned essential design skills such as creating a design system, usability testing, iteration, design critique, and presenting design decisions. By the end of the class, I was able to see my complete transformation and growth as a designer. And I feel the significance of this class in my life daily as my role at Zesty requires me to rapidly iterate and design solutions for our customers.
What challenges have you encountered along the way, and how have you overcome them?
One of the biggest challenges I faced was learning more than what was taught in the classroom.
College classes were great, but the limited interaction time with professors meant they could only cover so much. By the end of my first year, I realized we weren't diving deep into some UX topics as much as I wanted.
To fill in the gaps, I started reading everything I could find—articles, portfolios, newsletters from Medium, UX Planet, UX Collective, Nielsen Norman Group, Muzli, Growth.design, Bestfolios, and more. It was really unstructured and required a lot of self learning which was challenging as I had no way to assess my learning.
One game-changer I discovered just after graduating from college was "Refactoring UI" by Steve Schoger and Adam Wathan. Before reading it, I felt like my UI designs were always missing something, but I couldn't figure out what. Their book was full of practical advice and examples that really clicked for me.
I still use the lessons I learned from all these resources in my day-to-day work. They’ve been a huge part of my growth as a designer.
Among all the projects you’ve accomplished, which one is your highlight that you’d like to introduce to our community members?
The DubsTech Protothon - an online UX Hackathon
In 2017, DubsTech, a student club I led, noticed that many UX designers were dissatisfied with hackathons, as these events were mostly developer-focused, offering little opportunity for designers to showcase their skills.
To address this, we decided to experiment by hosting a UX Hackathon, or Protothon, focusing solely on design without any coding. Students received two to three design prompts and had a day or two to apply their rapid prototyping and design thinking skills.
The event was a huge success at our university, and by 2020, we had already hosted seven Protothons. In 2020, we expanded further by going online, attracting over 400 participants. Our reach extended beyond the University of Washington, drawing participants from universities and countries like India, Australia, Russia, Brazil, and Mexico. Our Protothon received media coverage and numerous mentions on LinkedIn. Several participants even mentioned that the event inspired them to switch to UX permanently.
And now in May 2024, we hosted our 11th Protothon along with Design Buddies where we had 650+ participants, 25 judges, 10 speakers, and 204 submissions!
I recommend any design student participate in our Protothon. You'll make new friends and add a new project to your UX portfolio. I’d also say Design professionals should join as well as speakers, judges, or mentors; it’s a fantastic way to engage and give back to the UX design community.
Do you have any particular design principles and philosophies that guide you through your work?
I always study existing solutions and design patterns that solve the problem my project is tackling. I may not necessarily adopt the same solution but it helps me assess existing solutions and see if they solve the problem well.
Iteration is King. I strongly believe in iterating during ideation. Usually the first few concepts are just starting points. I usually then share the designs with users (if possible) and collaborate internally as well with stakeholders. It is only then that I converge on a final concept. The changes you see from the first concept to the final concept can sometimes be minimal, and sometimes be significant, however I believe each of the changes are meaningful.
I do not like to reinvent the wheel. I like to leverage pre-made design systems.
Design Systems I like include: the MUI Design System, Shipfaster, Tailwind UI, and Github Primer.
I will then adapt the design system to my use case’s needs if required. This is rare and usually involves subtle changes.
I like to design all my high fidelity interfaces using a design system. It significantly accelerates my prototyping and exploration process.
What are some of the most valuable lessons or takeaways you've gained from your experiences as a designer and would like to share with other design peers?
Lesson 1: Don’t Jump Straight to Designing a Solution
When you get a feature request or feedback from a customer, it’s tempting to jump straight into designing a solution. However, these requests are often brief and missing key details. This can lead to misunderstandings and assumptions, resulting in solutions that don’t address the problem or are more complex than necessary.
Instead, I make it a point to reach out to the customer and understand their use case. I prefer video calls for this, but if that’s not possible, I’ll have longer chats with them on Slack. I focus on figuring out:
What’s their problem?
What’s the key outcome they want?
This helps me build a relationship with the customer and allows me to get their feedback and validation on the solution I’m working on.
Lesson 2: Break Large Projects into Smaller Parts/Phases
Breaking large projects into smaller parts makes everything more manageable. Smaller projects have a narrower scope, so they’re faster to build and get into production, which means customers see improvements sooner.
With large projects, there are often parts that are done while others are still in progress. If we wait to ship everything at once, we delay releasing parts that could have been shipped earlier. Plus, smaller projects are easier to test, making the process smoother overall.
Q7: Do you have any goals or aspirations for your future as a designer in your career that you’d like to share with our community members?
In my career, I have primarily focused on learning management systems, content management systems, and a few marketing websites. Looking ahead, I've decided to explore new areas, including:
UX Education
Advertising Billboards
Plastic Waste Collection and Recycling
Social Good and Social Service (specifically grassroots education)
My work in these areas may not always involve traditional UX work of designing apps and websites. While I do believe I will be able to leverage and apply my UX skills in these spaces, I am also keen to just contribute to meaningful projects, regardless of the specific role I play.
Q8: Do you have any design resources that we can share with others?
Learning Design Principles through examples:
Growth.design - they have great case studies that highlight how popular leverage UX principles and how they can further improve
Checklist.design - this is a comprehensive list of all the different types of UI patterns one must be aware of as a design along with appropriate articles and examples of the same
Mobbin - they have a collection of screenshots from the most popular apps
Books:
Refactoring UI - this book covers all the best practices on how to design beautiful UIs
Don’t Make Think - this book is one of my favorite UX books
Learn Figma:
Figma Masterclass - the most comprehensive well taught and structured Figma course that teaches designers how industry professionals use Figma
Free Photos & Illustrations:
Unsplash - amazing free HD stock photos, I actually upload some of my photos here as well
I know you are the founder of Dubstech. Can you tell me more about the organization and the events? What made you establish the organization?
DubsTech is the largest tech community at the University of Washington, Seattle. We host workshops, hackathons, and talks on design, data science, software engineering, and cyber-security. Some events of ours that we are most proud of hosting include:
Protothon - the world’s largest online UX hackathon that’s attended by over 500 people
Datathon - UW’s first data science hackathon that just completed its 5th iteration!
Data Visualization Certificate Program - we’re proud to share that we have taught Tableau and Power BI to over 500+ students since our founding, and now offer a structured certificate program on the same.
The original founding members of DubsTech were Humad Shah, Arnunabh Satpathy, David Melnichuk, and Zubair Amjad. They founded the club in 2015 with the sole objective of teaching classes on technology topics not taught in the classroom. Unfortunately they all left university the year after with Zubair remaining as the sole member. It was then that I joined DubsTech and worked with Zubair towards continuing and expanding the original vision that was set during the club’s founding.