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Tanya Donska, UareUx co-founder

Tanya Donska

I came to design through engineering, which means I approach a broken product the same way I’d approach a structural problem – find where the load is going, fix that first. Designing game interfaces taught me that systems come before stories. UX design turned out to be engineering with more ambiguity and fewer load tables, and I still find the ambiguity the interesting part.

Ten years in UX design services and UX consulting across logistics, finance, and enterprise software. In London for the last six, on a Global Talent visa – the UK’s way of saying the work was worth something.

I have a habit of finding the one thing nobody wanted to say out loud about a product and saying it in the first meeting. Clients find this either useful or slightly alarming. Usually both.

Here’s what I’ve worked on
Portrait of Tanya Donska
About Me

Outside the work.

I grew up in Ukraine, in a small industrial city, which probably explains the engineering degree.

It felt like the serious choice, the one that made sense in a city built around making things work. I liked the logic of it. I liked understanding why things held together and, more to the point, why they didn’t.

I moved into game development first – two years designing interfaces for things that didn’t exist yet, worlds that needed systems before they needed stories. It was the best possible training for design and I didn’t realise it at the time. The jump to UX Design felt obvious in retrospect. It is just engineering with more ambiguity and fewer load tables, and I still find the ambiguity more interesting than the certainty.

I was invited to the UK by the British Government through Tech Nation’s Global Talent programme – the UK’s way of saying the work was worth something, which I appreciated more than I expected to. It’s a strange thing to have your career validated by a visa, but there it is. I also run DNSK.WORK – embedded designers inside client teams, long-term. A separate thing from UareUx, same conviction behind it.

I have strong opinions about most things. The ones worth writing down ended up in a personal blog and the book. The ones worth judging got me onto the Awwwards jury. The rest stay in the first meeting.

If you’re here because you’re thinking about working together – bring the product itself, not a description of it. I will have opinions quickly, and most of them will be about something you had stopped noticing.

If this sounds like the right way to work

Start with a call
On Socials

Find me elsewhere.

I write more than I probably should, in more places than is strictly necessary.

LinkedIn X Behance Medium Hacker Noon Substack Awwwards Academia ORCID Crunchbase Wellfound Now
What I do

How I can help.

I’ve been doing both long enough to know which one a project actually needs.

It is not always the one people come in asking for.

UX consulting

Audits, strategy, design direction, team feedback. The answer to what’s wrong – and occasionally, what to stop doing entirely.

See More about UX consulting
Tanya Donska holding a newspaper on a London street

“Two things, in order.”

Clients tend to say two things. First: “that’s not what we thought the problem was.” Second, usually a few weeks later: “you were right.” I try not to make a thing of it.

Recent work
#Clean Energy #FinTech

YGrene

Brand identity, a prequalification app, and a homeowner portal for a clean-energy financing company – the illustrations made it look simple; the flows made it be.

YGrene project preview
#Real Estate #Technology

Referral Exchange

A mobile-first landing page for a realtor-matching service – the client brought wireframes; the work was making the page convert, starting with the phone number.

Referral Exchange project preview
#Travel & Tourism

Tour Partner Group

Four European travel companies merged overnight – the website’s job was to make 300 B2B experts feel like one brand, starting with the photography.

Tour Partner Group project preview

Where the load was going.

Wrong structure, wrong flow, wrong hierarchy. Sometimes all three. Here’s what fixing that looks like.

Some of it, anyway

The companies we help thrive

Latest from the blog

The thinking behind the work.

Tanya and Iryna write rarely and on purpose – about UX design, B2B website design, and the gap between how things should work and how they actually do.

The rest of the thinking

UX design brief template your agency actually needs

UX design test: how to run one when nobody believes it

UX design tutorials teach Figma. Not the hard part

Every UX design job board shows the same 200 roles

Is UX design oversaturated – or just the same portfolio?
Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently asked. Actually answered.

The questions people ask before they’ve decided anything, which are usually the honest ones.

Where I start. Engineers are trained to find the part actually taking the strain, which is rarely the part that visibly cracked. Products are no different, and it means I spend the first week somewhere nobody expected me to be looking.

Different work, and mostly other people’s hours. If a project here needed more of me than I had, I would say so rather than spread thinner and hope nobody noticed.

Then we argue about it, which is usually productive. Being wrong in front of each other early is a great deal cheaper than being polite about it until something has been built.

Most audits end with a document. Nobody has ever been persuaded by a document. This ends with a decision about what to do first, which is a shorter conversation and a harder one.

More than you would think, and less than I would like. Support tickets, session recordings and the sales team’s least favourite objections cover a surprising amount. But some things only users know, and no amount of inference substitutes for that.

Next step

Talk to a UX design expert. Or two.

The first conversation costs nothing, and it usually changes what people think the problem is.

Start with a call

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