Val Pavliuchenko – The Complexity of the AI Should Never Become the User’s Job

Written by: Dan Agbo

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A creative director and product designer on how founders and product teams can define a clear visual language, resist generic design decisions, and build products that remain distinct under scale.

Originality becomes harder to defend, as AI makes polished digital design easier to produce. Nielsen Norman Group’s outlook points to the need for deeper differentiation. Considering that, founders and product leaders keep asking: how do you build a product people instantly recognize, trust, and remember, instead of one that merely looks current?

Val Pavliuchenko believes that the answer lies in creative leadership. In his view, strong products are not shaped by surface polish alone, but by a clear design language, disciplined decision-making, and the confidence to resist generic solutions.

Val is the Founder and CEO of Hosanna Studio, an independent design studio focusing on user experiences. He earlier rose to Lead Designer at Milkinside, a product-design studio whose client work included global brands across technology, aerospace, and aviation. In that role, he contributed to projects connected with Google, Airbus, and Scandinavian Airlines. Across those environments, his focus was not just visual polish, but the design language through which a product speaks to users. That approach was tested at a high level: his projects for Scandinavian Airlines and Airbus Tripset received Red Dot recognition, and later, on an engagement with Dreame, a global smart-home cleaning brand with multiple major product lines and hundreds of filed patents, Val’s role expanded from solo contributor to creative director as the project budget grew fivefold with the scope of responsibility. More recently, his work has also included AI products, where the design challenge is not only differentiation, but making advanced systems feel understandable and dependable. 

Val, after years of building product systems for companies operating at a global scale, what tells you early that a product has a real identity?

In my opinion, a product has real identity when it still makes sense as it grows. Not just in one attractive screen, but across the whole experience. If new features are added, more people join the work, and the product still feels coherent, that usually means there is real structure behind it. If that feeling disappears the moment you move past the showcase screens, then what you really have is polish, not identity.

For me, that difference usually comes down to whether the product’s visual language has been defined clearly enough. That is where identity begins.

At Milkinside, you helped shape product design for major industry players, such as Google, Airbus, and Scandinavian Airlines. When you were building those experiences, what did you put in place to keep the product consistent across features, screens, and user journeys?

I focused on building the system underneath the screens. At that level, you cannot rely on taste alone, because there are too many people, pages, and use cases involved. I worked on the visual language itself: layout rules, typography, spacing, buttons, navigation patterns, and the way actions are surfaced, so the product feels coherent wherever the user enters.

Honestly, consistency is not just aesthetic. It reduces friction. When a user understands how one part of the product works, that confidence should carry into the next part. My goal was to build something repeatable without making it rigid: a system teams could extend without breaking the experience.

Many products lose clarity when too many people make small design decisions at once. In your own work, how have you protected a product’s core design language from getting diluted while still keeping teams aligned?

The first step is to define the core principles early and make them explicit. If the team is not aligned on what clarity means, how hierarchy works, and what should remain recognizable across the product, small local decisions start to chip away at the whole.

The second step is protecting the boundary between business input and creative responsibility. Stakeholders absolutely need to shape direction, priorities, and objectives. But someone still has to own coherence. In my experience, products lose identity when every new opinion starts rewriting the language. My role has often been to keep the system flexible enough to serve the business, but stable enough to remain stable.

Your work on projects for Scandinavian Airlines, Airbus Tripset, and Natural App received industry recognition. In those cases, what specific choices did you make that moved the work beyond clean execution and into something distinctive enough to stand out externally?

Work stands out when it feels precise and resolved. A lot of teams assume distinction comes from adding more, but my approach has usually been the opposite. I try to reduce noise until the product communicates with unusual clarity. That means being deliberate about rhythm, hierarchy, motion, proportion, and the role each element plays in supporting the core idea.

The other factor is discipline. Recognized work is rarely just stylish. It has a point of view, and it feels internally complete. My role was not simply to refine the surface, but to shape a language that felt confident all the way through. That is what people respond to, whether they are award juries or users. They can feel when a product knows what it is.

In your work on AI products, you designed interfaces that made advanced systems feel more understandable and usable. How did you turn technical complexity into an experience users could trust?

My starting point was simple: the complexity of the AI should never become the user’s job. Instead of asking people to adapt to the system, I designed the experience around clear choices, obvious next steps, and behavior that felt stable. I wanted users to feel guided, not tested.

What I was really doing was translating system capability into human confidence. A lot of AI products are powerful, but they still make the user do too much interpretive work. I tried to reduce that burden by giving the experience a stronger structure. If the path is clear and the behavior is consistent, trust forms much faster. For me, that is the real design challenge in AI: not making it look futuristic, but making it feel dependable.

For founders, product leaders, and creatives, what are the clearest signs that their product has become visually competent but strategically generic, and how can they change that?

Usually, the signs are clear. The product looks polished, but interchangeable. New features look acceptable on their own, yet they do not feel like parts of one recognizable system. The design follows market trends well, but it does not express a distinct logic, position, or point of view. That is usually what happens when teams optimize screens one by one instead of protecting the whole.

The first step is not to redesign everything. It is to define what the product should communicate before changing how it looks. Founders need to decide what must feel theirs unmistakably, and then give someone responsibility for protecting that across the system. Once that language is clear, the product can grow without becoming generic.