From UI Design to Product Designđź‘‹ Hi, PH community
Hi everyone! I’m Vsevolod, a Product Designer with 2+ years of experience.
A few years ago, I started my journey as a UI Designer. I enjoyed creating clean and visually appealing interfaces, but over time I realized I was much more interested in what happens behind them. Why do users behave the way they do? How can we make their experience better? At some point, I realized I wanted to do more than just design screens. I wanted to help shape products by generating and validating new ideas, analyzing user feedback, improving existing features, and introducing new ones.That’s what led me to Product Design.
Today, what I enjoy most is researching user needs, brainstorming ideas, thinking through product functionality, validating hypotheses, and collaborating with the team to grow a product. One of the most rewarding moments is when an idea you suggested actually works. When users start using a feature and say, “Wow, this is really useful!” Those moments remind me why I love product design.
We’re now living in the age of AI, and it’s a field I’m genuinely excited about. I want to keep growing in this space, work on AI-powered products, experiment with new ideas, and continue learning every day.
I’m excited to be part of this community and keep building! I’d love to connect with fellow designers, founders, and makers here. 👋
Replies
Welcome Vsevolod. The move you are describing, from making the screen to asking why people behave the way they do, is the whole job. Most people never make it.
One thing worth knowing if you are heading into AI products specifically. The hard design problems there are not visual, they are about trust and legibility. What does the user see before the system does something they cannot undo. How do you show that the machine is unsure without making it look broken. What does a good failure look like.
Almost nobody has good patterns for that yet, which means the field is unusually open to someone who thinks in user behaviour rather than components. The screens are the easy part and they are also the part everyone is competing on.
Good luck. Say what you are working on when you have something, people here will look.
@rabnoor_s Thanks for the advice, I'll look for AI projects
@vsevolod_shymko One practical thing, since looking for AI projects is easier said than done from the outside.
Do not look for design roles at AI companies. Look for AI products that already work and have obviously bad trust design, then write up what you would change and send it to the founder unprompted. There are a lot of those right now, because most teams shipping agents are engineers who have never had to design for "the machine did something and I need to know whether to believe it".
That approach gets read, because you are handing someone a solved problem rather than asking them for a slot. It also filters hard for teams worth joining, since the ones who reply thoughtfully to an unsolicited critique are the ones who will listen to you once you are inside.
The board here is a decent hunting ground for it. Plenty of launches every day, and the comments usually tell you where the trust gaps are before you even open the product.
@rabnoor_s Thanks, that's pretty much what I do. Do you know any products with bad user interfaces or any interesting ones that need some work?
@vsevolod_shymko A category rather than one product: open source developer tools.
The engineering is usually excellent and the interface is whatever the maintainer managed at midnight. Those makers are also unusually receptive, because they already know it is the weak part and there is no design team's feelings to protect.
Three that launched here yesterday fit exactly: witr, TraceLLM and Polygres. All open source, all with real engineering behind them, all with surfaces a product designer would visibly improve in an afternoon. Their makers were answering every single comment personally, so a specific note will get read.
Do not pitch. Read the page as a stranger, write down the exact sentence where you got lost, send them that. It is worth more to a maker than an upvote and it is how designers end up working with builders rather than cold-emailing them.