Tanya Donska
Tanya Donska came to design through engineering, which means when something's broken she looks for where the load is going before she touches anything else. Ten years of that. London for the last six.
She has 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.
Autobiography
Tanya Donska grew up in Ukraine, in a small industrial city, which probably explains the engineering degree. She liked understanding why things held together and, more to the point, why they didn't.
Game development came first – two years designing interfaces for things that didn't exist yet. The best possible training for UX design. She didn't realise it at the time. The move to UX was obvious in retrospect. Engineering with more ambiguity and fewer load tables. She's been doing it for ten years and still finds the ambiguity more interesting than the certainty.
Six years in London. Invited by the British Government through the Global Talent programme – their way of saying the work was worth something. It's a strange thing to have a career validated by a visa. Yet, there it is.
She has strong opinions about most things. The ones worth writing down ended up in her personal blog and the book “Looks Good to Me: On AI Sycophancy, Context Loss, and Inverted Baselines”. The ones worth judging got her onto the Awwwards jury. The rest come out in the first meeting.
If you're thinking about working together – the best version of that conversation starts with the actual product. Not the deck. Not the roadmap. The thing people are using.
Mentions
The work ends up in places. Authority Magazine on the future of work. Sitepoint on AI model collapse in design tools. ACM on what happens when AI trains on AI output. Consultant Magazine on the onboarding step that actually moves the needle. Built In on why training won't fix bad AI design. Pitchwall on what founders should know before spending money on product design. Startup Nation on product UX before building a SaaS. Favourite Design for an interview about the engineering degree. Seat.fm on UX band-aids that hide real problems. IssueWire on the free UX review for SaaS founders. BuzzFeed on things nobody tells you about working from home. NowNowNow for what Tanya is doing right now.
Book
Everyone using AI in design has noticed something's off. “Looks Good to Me: On AI Sycophancy, Context Loss, and Inverted Baselines” is Tanya Donska naming it. Nine problems. Already happening. Written down.
/ 01
How old is Tanya Donska?
How old is Tanya Donska?
Tanya doesn't publish her age, which is both a personal choice and, frankly, none of Google's business. The work is ten years deep if that helps.
/ 02
Who is Tanya Donska's partner?
Who is Tanya Donska's partner?
If you're here for that, the autobiography section is probably as personal as it gets.
/ 03
What is DNSK.WORK?
What is DNSK.WORK?
A UI/UX design agency without the agency part. Embedded inside SaaS products that mostly work, fixing the flows that have been on the roadmap long enough that nobody remembers who put them there. Senior design, no agency overhead, no discovery phase. In your Figma by week one.
/ 04
Did Tanya Donska study illustration?
Did Tanya Donska study illustration?
Engineering, actually. The illustration happened in the margins – literally. She drew through most of the degree, which probably should have been a signal. It wasn't, until later.
/ 05
How did Tanya get into UX without knowing what UX was?
How did Tanya get into UX without knowing what UX was?
Game design. She spent two years building interfaces for worlds that didn't exist yet – systems before stories, logic before aesthetics. A founder saw the work and hired her for a product role before she had a name for what she was doing. The name came later. The approach didn't change much.
/ 06
Does Tanya actually use engineering principles when reviewing products?
Does Tanya actually use engineering principles when reviewing products?
Yes. Not the terminology, but the logic. Where is the load going. What's holding weight it wasn't built for. What fails first when something goes wrong. It's the same question, different material.
/ 07
Does Tanya apply engineering concepts like stress analysis when auditing UX debt?
Does Tanya apply engineering concepts like stress analysis when auditing UX debt?
Yes. Not the terminology – the logic. Where is the load going. What's holding weight it wasn't designed for. What fails first when something breaks. Same question, different material. The engineering degree turned out to be useful in ways the degree programme definitely didn't intend.
/ 08
Does she keep notebooks of design mistakes?
Does she keep notebooks of design mistakes?
Digital, actually. They ended up as a blog category. The patterns that kept showing up, written down before the next product made the same mistake. It's called #Not_My_Type
/ 09
How does Tanya balance being confrontational with keeping the trust of the people she works with?
How does Tanya balance being confrontational with keeping the trust of the people she works with?
She doesn't soften the observation. She's careful about the moment. There's a difference between saying something true at the wrong time and saying something true when the room is ready to hear it. Ten years of reading rooms. It's the actual skill nobody teaches.