Anastasia Buialo / UX- and Product Designer, Oslo
Research, design decisions & testing shaped into products people actually use.
I'm a UX designer with a background in visual communication and eight years of building digital products, from early-stage startups and scaled technology platforms to member associations and charities. I work insight-driven: hypotheses, testing, learning. Less friction, more control for the user, measurable effect for the business.
How I work
I start from a hypothesis and what would have to be true for it to hold.
From there, I test early with the people who'll actually use it and let what they show me steer the work, not gut feeling. I'd rather learn cheaply from a rough prototype than polish the wrong thing.
Design
Interaction design·Concept development·Wireframing & prototyping·UI design·Design systems·Form design·Visual identity & graphic design
Research & insight
User testing·User interviews·Journey & service mapping·Card sorting·A/B & hypothesis testing·Analytics and metrics·Insight reporting
Tools & AI
Figma, FigJam·Hotjar·Google Analytics·Lyssna·Notion·Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop·Vibe coding with AI·AI-assisted prototyping·AI-assisted research synthesis·Designing AI-driven features·Shipping to git via the terminal & the Claude–Figma bridge
Ways of working
Cross-functional collaboration·Stakeholder communication·Workshop facilitation·Design ops·Curiosity·Student and trainee mentorship·Working across markets & cultures
Selected work
Some of this work can't be shown publicly and some data is anonymised due to NDAs. Happy to walk through the details over a coffee.
Tiltakshåndboka is RBUP's living overview of what works in children's and youth mental health. I lead the insight and UX improvements, insight-driven and AI-assisted, for a deeply professional resource with demanding navigation across conditions, measures, tests and systematic reviews.
- Insight into how clinicians and researchers actually search
- AI-assisted findability, from a question in your own words to the right summary
- Navigation and structure for a complex professional domain
Role
Insight lead · UX improvements
In the project
FinAut runs the authorisation schemes that keep advisers in Norwegian finance qualified. The portal sits on several supplier-owned learning platforms, and nobody, candidate or administrator, gets a clear status when they log in. I led the insight work and turned it into a decision basis: one diagnosis, a recommended direction, and three priorities to start from.
- Expert evaluation, depth interviews and moderated tests with all three user groups
- Journeys mapped with the mental model method, plus a mapping of the system landscape
- Prioritised recommendations, documented accessibility and GDPR breaches, and interface concepts
Role
UX design · Insight lead
In the project
A UX lift for a vocational college growing beyond health. I raised the bar for navigation, information architecture and conversion, and gave the team a CMS they can run, alongside a visual designer, content designer and developer.
- Information architecture organised by intent, not the org chart
- A CMS-friendly block system the team can run without a developer
- A guided journey to "meld interesse" and "søk studieplass"
Role
UX design · IA · Interaction
In the project
c)optikk is Norway's largest association of privately owned optician stores. To make their members' expertise in eye health visible, they launched a new certification brand and the website optikerklinikk.no. Netlife delivered the name, brand, identity, content and design; I owned the UX.
- Evaluated the existing concept and designed the new site on the new visual identity
- Anchored design decisions in insight from user testing
- Contributed sketches and direction for the visual language
Role
UX design · Concept development
In the project
Otovo is a marketplace for residential solar, organising hundreds of vetted local installers. I led Solar Planner, a new self-checkout purchase flow, validating whether customers ready to commit could buy faster on their own.
- Discovery through user and stakeholder interviews, archetypes and journey mapping
- Low-to-mid fidelity wireframes, tested and iterated through remote interviews and metrics
- The pilot showed self-checkout works when assisted: the customer stays in charge, a sales agent monitors and steps in on questions
+40%
conversion for customers who started self-checkout
In the project
Roles
- Netlife, UX- and Product Designer · 2025 –
- Otovo, UX Designer · 2020–25
- Correlate, UX Designer · 2018–20
- Norwegian Refugee Council, Graphic Designer · 2018–19
- Indexo, UX Designer · 2018
Education
- BA Visual Communication, Polish-Japanese Academy of IT, Warsaw · 2014–17
- BA Media Communication, Taras Shevchenko University, Kyiv · 2010–14
Certifications
- Claude Code in practice, Anthropic · 2026
- Vibe coding with AI, Oschlo · 2025
- Product Discovery Certification, Mind the Product · 2025
- Prototyping in Figma, Designlab · 2025
- Mobile UX Design, Interaction Design Foundation · 2023
- UX research programme, University of Michigan (Coursera) · 2020
Recognition
- UX Nordic Award finalist, Otovo Solar Planner · 2023
- Shorthand Award, best non-profit story, NRC · 2019
Languages
- English · Norwegian · Ukrainian · Polish
My roots are in clean, disciplined design. During my studies I was drawn most to modernism, De Stijl and a bit of wabi-sabi. These days I like to mess around too, on screen and by hand: found objects, handmade marks, and the odd happy accident.
A display font that began as paper: letterforms cut freehand with scissors, no sketches, then scanned, traced and built into a working typeface. Every jag and overshoot is a knife decision kept, not an error removed.
1 Arrange – shapes become letters
2 Cut – freehand, no sketches
3 Scan, trace & refine – errors kept, on a baseline grid in Figma
4 The working OTF – set live
References
Two references met in the middle: Norwegian black-metal lettering (hand-drawn, symmetrical, dissolving into branches) and 19th-century botanical plates, where every thorn is documented with care. Thornskull is the overlap.
Identity and visual language for a rave collective. The wordmark starts as sharpie letters drawn by the collective’s founder, traced and run through fingerprint moirés, scanner noise and channel-split glitches, an identity built to degrade on purpose, loud where the grid is quiet.
1 Explore – wordmark states and poster system
2 Texture – forest moss and an open-source fingerprint moiré
3 Degrade – scanner noise and channel-split glitches
4 The wordmark – never the same twice
References
Theodor Kittelsen’s Nøkken (the creature surfacing from dark water) set the mood: Nordic folklore mystery, rendered in club-poster language.
Outside work I draw, style people and rehabilitate injured birds. Much of this work happens outside invoices: pro bono, or bartered with emerging artists working for a non-profit cause. I also enjoy nature, new music, documentaries, and homemade ramen.
About
What I do best is gather insight and make complicated things simpler. I talk to users and stakeholders often, so I learn quickly and can change course when the evidence points elsewhere. I back decisions with data and what people actually say, and I build rough prototypes early, because it is cheaper to learn than to polish the wrong thing.
I've lived in three countries and explored many more. I speak English, Ukrainian, Norwegian and Polish, and I'm used to working with diverse cultures. Outside client work, I do pro bono design for causes I care about and volunteer with injured birds.
Got a project, need a design sounding board, or just want to spar? Get in touch.