People of OST: Aniket Patole, Product Designer

Aniket is a Product Designer with more than 4 years of experience and has built many enterprises as well as consumer-facing products that are being used by millions of users. In his free time, you’ll find him contemplating design, culture, and society. Apart from digital products, he likes to talk about wrist-watches, indie movies, anime, and 70s psychedelic rock music.

Tell us about yourself!

I have more than four years of industry experience in product design. Currently, I’m working on multiple projects, one of which is the web version of Pepo. The other project I am working on is a design system, which we are trying to build in parallel to shipping the Pepo features and other products. Before OST, I worked extensively on enterprise products, but I also have my fair share of working on consumer-centered products. I hold a master’s degree in product design, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. I have also completed a product development project, offered by Design Factory, Aalto University, Finland.

What’s been your experience working here?

I joined OST because I personally think blockchain will be the future tech. Even if blockchain isn’t mainstream at the moment, there will be products and services based on blockchain. Somewhere down the line, we will all be users of the blockchain. That’s the reason why I was quite curious about blockchain and joining the OST team.

In my former roles, there were no technical constraints to be considered, so I was more or less a product designer with user and business requirements on my primary agenda. At OST, I have to consider the technical constraints for every feature that we are designing. That’s one of the major challenges of this role. It’s been really great working here, the team is amazing.

Is product design different for crypto products?

There’s not much of a difference from a user experience perspective. Users use a product because it solves their problem. Users love products that conveniently solves their problems. While designing crypto products or services, we have to make sure that we are solving a very specific user problem. We can’t just think about the technology because most users don’t care what the product is built on.

When we are talking about the difference between non-crypto products and crypto products, the biggest caveat is having to understand the blockchain technology layer. I think blockchain is not yet a mainstream technology as there are constraints to consider when building products. In a centralized system, the transaction happens within the blink of an eye, while in certain blockchains, as you know, it takes much longer. While we are designing products, we have to make sure our user experiences are designed accordingly.

What are the greatest challenges of user experience design?

While designing products, we have to consider who our target group is and their requirements. As blockchain becomes mainstream, we have to make sure the overall experience is jargon-free and easy to use. The biggest challenge for designing crypto products is that there is no control-z, the transactions are irreversible. We have to make sure that the overall user experience is crystal clear and as there is little room for human error.

What are your favorite wrist-watches and psychedelic rock artists?

I like analog watches, I hate digital watches! I hate the current state of products that we are in. We have to charge our wristwatches, we have to charge our headphones, we have to charge our mobile phones, we have to charge everything that we use.

I have roughly 23 watches in my collection. Today I’m wearing an HMT Vijay. HMT is an Indian brand that was started by India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, so there is a really nice history to it. I have four or five, very rare HMT wristwatches. In terms of music, I listen to a lot of genres. Though, I mostly listen to a lot of psychedelic rock, including artists like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, and Leonard Skinner.

Thank you, Aniket!

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