Anastasiia Dyachenko and the Trouble With Looking Better

A new interface makes an excellent promise. The buttons will look deliberate. The typography will behave. Someone will finally retire the shade of blue that has survived three strategy meetings. Anastasiia Dyachenko is interested in what happens after the applause, when an existing customer opens the redesigned product and tries to do something familiar. A screen can improve its appearance while making that task harder. The celebration and the problem can occupy the same release.

Dyachenko, co-founder and CEO of UX Trauma Center by Cadabra, has written about precisely this mismatch. Founders ask for a redesign because a product looks old or a competitor looks better. She recognizes the impulse; she says she once shared it. Her attention has since moved toward the logic of a product, the routes people take through it and the decisions that accumulated while the business was growing.

That admission gives her argument some texture. She approaches the request as someone who understands the attraction of a better-looking screen. Her career has room for visual pleasure. It also has room for asking whether the pleasure will survive contact with the people expected to use it.

A portfolio with coffee and clockwork

Her public design portfolio offers an agreeable place to begin. There is a project called Steampunk player. There are My Coffee, Pizza delivery, Smart house and Tourist island. The subjects belong to the familiar territory of interface design: listening, ordering, finding, controlling. Together they show the range of everyday activities that can become a designer’s assignment.

Dyachenko joined Behance in August 2014. Her profile lists graphic design, UI/UX and web design, connects her to the Cadabra Studio team and gives the Ukrainian city then called Dnipropetrovsk as its location. Several projects carry multiple owners. The portfolio is a record of collaborative work, with its credit shared accordingly.

The titles also make a useful counterweight to the vocabulary of enterprise software. Before a discussion of governance or product architecture, there is coffee to order and music to play. Those ordinary tasks keep the purpose of an interface close at hand. A user generally arrives with something to accomplish. The designer’s explanation of the interface comes later, if it is needed at all.

Four people, then a business

Cadabra dates its beginning to 2015. Its account places four technologists in a small apartment with laptops and coffee, starting without venture capital. Dyachenko leads the business as CEO; Igor Dyachenko is its CTO. The firm’s leadership page also identifies finance, creative, people and solutions roles. A design practice has become an organization with different kinds of work to coordinate.

The modest beginning matters more than its scenery. Four people can carry much of a project in conversation. As a studio grows, that informal understanding has to travel further. The client, designer, developer and project manager need some dependable way of knowing what has been decided. Otherwise, the meeting ends and several slightly different projects leave the room.

In May 2019, Dyachenko was already writing about the machinery of remote collaboration. Her account described setting aside time for direct discussion with designers early in a project, keeping customers informed through progress reports and taking time-zone differences seriously. The details were practical: a customer should be able to understand what happened today and what is planned next.

There is a recurring concern here with making work visible. Remote service requires a customer to trust activity they cannot casually observe. Reporting gives that activity a shape. A conversation gives an ambiguous request somewhere to be examined. Neither produces a glamorous portfolio image, but both affect what the portfolio image eventually represents.

The customer on the other side

One revealing turn in Dyachenko’s business record puts her in the customer’s chair. In a public review of GrowPad, she described bringing in outside help for Cadabra’s marketing: website optimization, link building and content. The engagement led the studio to reconsider its approach and rework its website structure. A company paid to improve other people’s digital products was commissioning improvements to its own.

She also reviewed Blue Tree as the CEO of a design and development agency. That engagement concerned SEO and digital marketing for an agency client. Her assessment emphasized quality and a service that required little day-to-day intervention. Updates and delivery were part of the account. The customer’s experience of coordination had become something she could judge from the receiving end.

These episodes offer a grounded view of a founder’s working life. Expertise does not remove the need to buy expertise. A studio can understand design and still seek help with how its own business is found and presented. The useful question becomes whether the outside team understands the assignment well enough to move it forward without making the customer manage every detail.

There is a pleasing symmetry in that position. The person who explains the value of clear collaboration has to evaluate somebody else’s version of it. A status report is easy to regard as routine until you are the person waiting for one.

A design file has a future

Dyachenko’s attention also follows the work into implementation. In a LinkedIn post about Figma, she argues that poorly organized frames, copied styles and duplicated components can create extra work for developers. Her proposed questions concern how a file is structured, whether it contains a functioning design system and whether its export has been checked against development needs.

This is a specific extension of the designer’s responsibility. A mockup can be persuasive in a presentation while leaving its next user, the developer, with a series of puzzles. The interface has an internal audience before it reaches its external one. Naming, reusable components and predictable behavior help that audience turn a proposal into software.

Her January 2025 guide to enterprise UX widens the setting again. Business applications have defined users, complex workflows and tasks that must fit into an organization’s operations. She discusses observing employees at work, using workshops and studying tools in context. The assignment demands attention to what people actually do during a working day.

That makes observation a useful check on a persuasive brief. A process may sound orderly when described in a meeting, then reveal exceptions, interruptions and repeated steps when someone performs it. Designing around the description alone risks preserving the misunderstanding in a cleaner layout. Watching the work gives the team something more concrete to argue about.

“For me, redesign stopped being about screens a long time ago.”

Anastasiia Dyachenko, on product redesign

The form is part of the relationship

Her writing on insurance UX brings these concerns down to individual interactions. Policy information needs to be understandable. A dashboard needs to make relevant details accessible. A customer working through a process needs to know where they are and what happens next. The recommendations include plain-language summaries, information revealed in layers and clearer progress through forms.

There is a connection between that customer and the client waiting for a project update. Both need an intelligible account of an unfamiliar process. Both may have reasonable questions that the organization has stopped noticing because the answers seem obvious from inside. An interface can conceal the next step just as effectively as a project team can.

Dyachenko’s writing about regulated industries adds another participant: the people responsible for the rules. She advocates involving them alongside researchers early in the work, then checking how the proposed experience functions. A form must respect its constraints while remaining possible to complete. Legal information needs a considered place in the interaction. The requirement to include something does not settle how a person will encounter it.

The through-line is coordination. Different specialists hold different pieces of the explanation. Someone has to bring those pieces together while there is still time to change the plan. Otherwise, the interface becomes the place where every unresolved conversation arrives for the customer to sort out.

The question before the sprint

By early 2026, Dyachenko’s public article titles were pressing further into software strategy. In January she published on development speed and on the future engineering capacity committed by AI-generated software. In February came an argument for research-driven development. Her accompanying description questioned treating speed as the central measure of success when teams can produce more software more quickly.

The emphasis is on understanding what is worth building and retaining comprehension of what has been built. That fits the earlier concerns about communication and handoffs. A decision made quickly still has to be understood by the people implementing it. The resulting system will require explanation after the sprint ends.

Her broader writing on product teams uses the idea of an interaction field to describe how relationships affect execution. It brings her attention back to the people making the product: how they connect, how decisions move and whether a team can act coherently. The scope has widened considerably from arranging the visible parts of a screen.

Yet the original design question remains recognizable. Someone arrives wanting to accomplish something. What stands between them and the result? For the person ordering coffee, it may be a confusing interface. For the founder commissioning a redesign, it may be a product decision nobody has revisited. Dyachenko’s work keeps following that obstruction upstream, to the point where choosing a different button would leave the more interesting problem untouched.