Juhi is a UX Designer who finished her Masters at the University of St Andrews in 2017. She’s passionate about creating usable workflows and improving digital design experiences. As an avid traveller she’s always planning her next getaway, or perched up somewhere to take a stunning photograph. Her other interests include trying her hand at new dishes and reading fiction.

Tell us about yourself!

I’m based out of Pune, Maharashtra. I’ve lived here for a little over a decade now. As for my background, I completed my undergrad in Communication Management, majoring in Advertising. After working for about two years, I went on to do my Masters in IT with a focus on Human Computer Interaction (HCI). That little transition from Advertising to HCI was all thanks to a colleague who showed me how holistic this ever-evolving field is. Something I’ve come to realise as I have grown, is the need and want to discover and learn new things. My interests have moved from being an environmentalist to a travel blogger, from an adventurer to a writer, to now, well a user experience designer. What remains constant among all of this though, is the process of understanding issues, demystifying them and conveying that understanding, making it comprehensive. It’s what I enjoy, and I keep looking for opportunities to be able to do that.

What excites you about blockchain?

I can’t quite remember when was the first time I heard about blockchain. However, I do remember when I was still studying, back in 2016, there was a lot of talk about and around Bitcoin. I didn’t quite understand it and I wasn’t too fussed either, to be honest. But after a point, it was quite difficult to navigate through tech news without reading about something related to the blockchain. So that’s when I started skimming through articles, though my understanding of it was still fairly superficial. I actually started to research what blockchain and OST were all about, a little over a year ago, when I was applying for this job here at OST. Safe to say there’s abundant scope for how blockchain is going to revolutionise the world — in whatever way we choose to adopt this technology. I’m not going to pretend to know all about this tech that I’ve only very recently started to learn about. So I’ll tell you what I’m most excited about blockchain is the usability aspect of it. I’m quite keen to see how we solve the issues around breaking the entry barrier for a common user and welcoming them into the world of blockchain technology without intimidating them or confusing them. As a user if they can engage with the product or service without having to worry about what tech it runs on, I’d say that’s quite a huge problem tackled from a usability experience standpoint where blockchain is concerned, and I’m super excited about that!

What does your role as User Experience Designer at OST entail?

It is essentially designing B2B user experiences and interfaces for all of our consumer-facing blockchain apps and tools. Making it usable, functional, and aesthetic too. Of course, to be able to do this, we have a lot going on behind the scenes: conducting user interviews, testing our hypotheses and validating our designs to understand if we’re actually solving the problem we’ve set out to solve.

So when it comes to my role, the primary focus is the products I work on ensuring that our partner companies who use those very products have a flawless experience using, integrating or customising it to their needs. Another little task I’ve taken up that I share with Prineel, our Lead UX Designer, is maintaining consistency of our design language across all OST products. All of this remains in keeping up with ensuring that the end-to-end user experience is absolutely secure and seamless.

What major projects have you worked on at OST?

One of the main projects for me has been OST KYC. More recently, the focus has moved to gearing up for the launch of KIT, our SaaS platform. This also means, in the future, a lot of work I did on KYC previously will likely integrate with the KIT platform, so I’m really excited for how we go about it whenever we do. It’s going to be super working on and designing an all-inclusive solution that caters to almost all the needs of a client when they partner with OST.

What do you look forward to for OST in the following months?

Everything! We’re launching on mainnet, there’s a lot of buzz around the office. It’s all hands on deck, and everyone’s putting in their 110%! Launching on mainnet also means we’ll have our partners running their pilots which is going to be a fantastic learning opportunity for everyone involved as well. I’m sure we’re all looking forward to feedback from our stakeholders, internally and externally, so we can build better and deliver our very best.

Thank you, Juhi!

Be sure to check out last week’s interview with OST blockchain engineer Gulshan Vasnani. Subscribe to our YouTube channel or listen to the audio format anywhere you listen to podcasts, including iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. We’re also now available on Alexa! Simply add “OST LIVE” to your flash briefing.

About OST

OST blockchain infrastructure empowers new economies for mainstream businesses and emerging DApps. OST leads development of the OpenST Protocol, a framework for tokenizing businesses. In September 2018 OST introduced the OpenST Mosaic Protocol for running meta-blockchains to scale Ethereum applications to billions of users. OST KIT is a full-stack suite of developer tools, APIs, and SDKs for managing blockchain economies. OST partners reach more than 300 million end-users. OST has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune. OST is backed by leading institutional equity investors including Tencent, Greycroft, Vectr Ventures, and 500 Startups.