Beyond the PX: In conversation with Junaid Hashmi, Design lead at Bolo
Welcome to the #IndianDesigner conversation series in the 8px magazine.
This is the Third interview with Hyderabad based designer, Junaid Hashmi
Junaid has been on a mission to solve universal literacy, leading the super talented design team at Bolo. Though the Indian economy has been growing fast, illiteracy has remained a big roadblock and Bolo, a speech-based reading tutor app by Google is here to make an impact.
He’s also got some excellent advice for junior designers to get started in the industry.
Enjoy, and see you next time.
For those not in the know, can you explain briefly who Bolo are and what they do?
Bolo is a speech-based reading tutor app by Google, trying to solve universal literacy.
We designed it for 6–12 years old kids from low-income families, to improve their reading skills in their native language and English. Bolo helps a child by encouraging them to read aloud — as they would naturally do — and giving them instant feedback — even when completely offline.
Right now, Bolo helps children improve their read skills from among 9 global languages.
What has been your design journey up until now?
Looking back at my childhood, three habits made design a natural career move for me — an interest in art, being organized, and observing people.
Growing up in Bhopal, a small town in central India, the slow pace of life gave me enough time to work on these habits. My reasonable skills at art filled my notebooks with doodles, paintings, and calligraphy. A lot of my time went into organizing my things because of my strong sense of order. I was also fascinated with people and used to observe people’s actions and habits.
By education, I am a chemist and landed in design as a profession by a coincidence. Following the usual path of an Indian school student, I took admission in an engineering college. It was here in my first semester that I found design as a curriculum. It was quite surprising to find that people paid designers to make pretty things. I also had no idea that people used design to solve problems. The next five years of college had me taking design courses as electives while freelancing as a graphic designer.
I skipped employment interviews in my college and looked for design opportunities instead. Product design didn’t exist then and it was challenging to find digital design jobs in India. Everyone asked for relevant education more than a portfolio. My career started with an internship thanks to a small design firm in Delhi. From there, my work covered spaces like games, apps, and websites. My teams worked on problems like how people chat, or how students map their career.
What does your typical morning look like?
One can imagine a usual family guy morning for me. My day starts around 7 AM with my two children using me as a trampoline and waking me up to play. The usual chores follow — helping my wife, getting the children ready for breakfast, and getting ready for work. Before heading to work, I make time for prayers, and squeeze time for a workout if ‘I’m feeling lucky’.
I avoid using phone or checking emails and messages until work.
My half an hour commute helps me clear my head before work. At work, Google has people from a lot of timezones, the emails and messages never stop and can get overwhelming. I start by clearing the inbox whilst gulping down a cup of coffee.
Unblocking others lets me jump into whatever individual work I have for the day.
What does your design tool stack look like?
Independent of my immediate role or project, a note-taking tool, and a design tool are essentials for me. Right now, it would be Notion for all my notes, and Figma for design explorations (browsers FTW!)
I don’t get to spend much time on design right now. Depending on my work, my stack can shuffle between Slides, Sketch, and Principle quite often.
Do you have any design hacks?
I am always taking notes. Scrappy and tons of them. Feedback notes beside my artboards in Figma or Sketch. Notes about issues, and decisions in meetings.
Being disciplined about notes improved my conversations with my team members who aren’t designers. The notes help me in thinking clearly, aligning the team, arriving faster at the core design problem, and maintaining a log of design feedback and journey.
Do your career aspirations encroach your life? Can you divide them? Does design inform your approach to fashion, music, etc?
Career aspirations did (and still do) encroach my life all the time. The transition to being a parent was the hardest while balancing work. Fortunately, my wife supported me to prioritize, and think with clarity about the balance between work and life.
How do you design ‘for the future’?
The focus on things being repetitive or not is not a concern for me. I instead look for reusable patterns to enable people to use the product with comfort. There’s also the opportunity to work for a population that might use phones to experience technology for the first time in their lives. This makes a stronger case for similarities, and repetition to lower their learning curve.
Our team tries to design for the future by extensive conversations with the population we want to serve. We try to not look for anything fancy and plan to design for how people will use our product in their future. We also pay attention to understand the type of behavior changes that might develop in the population after using our products.
What attracted you to solving the universal literacy problem at Google’s product — Bolo?
Interest and involvement in educating children goes back to my days in college. It developed while working with Dr. H. C. Verma (the man behind Concepts of Physics) in NSS to teach rural children around our campus.
After that, I spent several summer breaks to teach spoken English to rural students in summer schools. After graduation, I worked with a few non-profits working in education or related projects.
I am thankful to be a part of all these initiatives, but they face the challenge of scale. A consumer app — that works offline, doesn’t need any external intervention, and gives a child the chance to learn in their safe space, has the ability to reach and scale to millions around the world.
As a designer, a rare opportunity to have a fundamental, direct, and meaningful impact on many lives, drew me to Bolo.
What’s your team dynamic?
For several months, it was only one engineer and me working on this project and wearing many hats. After the team grew to 14 people, we now have several engineers, a product manager, and a few researchers as well.
Now, I work with the people leading the product, engineering, and research on a regular basis.
Will your product exist in ten years' time?
Our wish is that we solve universal literacy in the next decade, and there are fewer people that need our current product.
I do hope that the product evolves to enable a massive population to become educated and be able to dramatically improve their lives.
What advice would you give for those interested in kick-starting a career in designing for the market?
My experience can suggest people interested in design to first learn to share, learn the craft, and then learn to sell.
In my experience, many budding designers consider their work to be (a representation of) their identity. This makes them averse to sharing their in-progress work early, and often hampers their learning curve. This prevents them from growing their knowledge of the product building process.
Learning the craft — visual, interaction, and prototyping skills help raise the team’s bar with the quality of work. Not every designer is lucky to work with people who have even better if not the same attention to detail and sense of finesse.
Learning to sell was a lesson learned the hard way and can mean many things — repetitive focus on the user, team alignment over the business, or picking a solution. Soft skills are usually the ones overlooked at school when they are the ones that are one of the most effective.
Have you been impressed with the junior designers you’ve worked with?
The juniors and fresh graduates in India are far ahead of where I was when I started a decade ago. They are certainly more qualified and have a better knowledge of using design practices and methods. What surprises me more is their higher levels of self-awareness and open-mindedness.
It is my belief that the Indian design industry owes a lot to the juniors. They are the powerhouse who explore, refine, and execute the actual designs. The best ones I’ve met go out of their way to learn, are also more enthusiastic, and entrepreneurial in their approach.
What’s your opinion on our overworking culture?
Overworking is never a worthy method to build up skills, or exploring new techniques. This routine is also not limited to the designers alone and can vary by the type of designers.
I do think this is a loose generalization of the software work culture. It is also worth considering that designers tend to spend most of their waking hours on screens, and this creates an overlap between work and learning.
It was fascinating to see how since his childhood only, Junaid was able to develop his strong observational abilities and discovered his knack for art. Eventually, he was able to use his design skills to solve big problems like universal literacy! Feel free to check out more of his work here.
I thank Junaid on behalf of the readers of 8px for being a part of this series and sharing his inspiring insights.
Until next time 👋
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A selection of our other interviews:
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About the author:
Shivam Dewan is a product designer based in New Delhi, India.
Remote worker by day, Flaneur by night. Feel free to reach out to him over Twitter @theshivamdewan
