Blog | Renat Usmanov
News about projects, achievements, and work experience.
Build mobile apps with YappiX using AI and chat
YappiX is an AI-powered CMS for mobile apps. You describe what you want in chat, and the system scaffolds a real application, generates UI components, hooks them to data, and ships builds — without standing up your own servers.
Article 1 — Results, hiring, and where clients actually come from in 2025
TL;DR: I shut down my regional web studio in 2022 and doubled down on a “solo operator” model. I hire selectively (audit, QA, DevOps, legal/finance, localization) and let AI handle the glue work. Here’s who to hire, when to hire, and where the clients really are in 2025 — backed by data.
Article 2 — In 2025 I’m a one-person company. My “developers” are AI agents (and this is how I keep it safe)
In 2025 I leaned fully into the company-of-one model. I’m the product owner and lead designer; AI agents accelerate coding and deployment. They generate components, write docs for each other, cross-review, and even handle first-pass debugging. I ship real products with complex business logic — schemes, forms, integrations, CI/CD — using Cursor for repo-aware coding, Figma for tokens and systems, and Builder.io for visual front-end composition.
Identifying when a design is complete
You’ve put a lot of work and effort into your mobile app designs. As you continue to iterate, you might wonder how you’ll know when you’ll be finished working on a design project. There are some important questions to ask yourself to help you decide whether your designs are complete.
About additional Gestalt Principles
As a reminder, Gestalt Principles describe how humans group similar elements, recognize patterns, and simplify complex images when perceiving objects. In other words, the human brain attempts to organize information by subconsciously arranging the parts into a cohesive whole. Applying Gestalt Principles in your mockups will help create user-friendly designs that are rooted in psychology and human behavior.
Use unity and variety in mockups
In the course video, you learned about how the concepts of unity and variety can be incorporated into the designs that you create to keep the attention of users and improve their engagement with your product.
Use scale and proportion in mockups
Scale and proportion are design concepts you can strategically incorporate in your mockups to help make a design visually pleasing and capture a user’s attention.
Use hierarchy in mockups. Tips
As a reminder, the main goal of using hierarchy in your designs is to guide the user. Hierarchy helps the user know where to focus first and what action to take.
Don’t turn focal point into fecal point
Providing a design that meets the needs of your users is always the goal of UX design. One way that you can ensure that your users understand and find the important areas of your design is by using emphasis. Emphasis means that an object or element is attracting attention. When part of a design has emphasis, the user’s eye is drawn there when they look at an app screen or webpage. There are several ways to add emphasis to your designs.
Accessibility considerations for color
Color is one of the ways that you, as a designer, can connect with the emotions of users and draw attention to certain parts of a design. But when you design a product, it’s important to think about how color is interpreted by all users of the product. Some users will have difficulty perceiving certain colors or color combinations, so the information that the colors of your design convey could be lost. It’s critical that your designs are inclusive and reflect the diverse needs of the product’s users. Plus, designing with accessibility in mind makes it easier for all users to interact with your designs.
Identify types of bias in UX research
Hi. let’s explore how bias can get in the way. In this video, we’re going to discuss how bias specifically affects design work. We’ll examine six kinds of biases: confirmation bias, false consensus bias, primacy bias, recency bias, implicit bias, and the sunk cost fallacy.
Design Thinking Process and Its Phases
Design plays a crucial role in a product’s success. A product that fails to meet its customers’ needs cannot be successful on the market. In order to increase chances of success, more and more companies are focusing on human-centered design — they put the end user at the heart of product design and evaluate every design decision according to the user’s needs and wants. Design thinking is one type of human-centered design methodology that enables companies to solve design challenges in innovative ways. This article will describe the design thinking methodology and walk you through each step of this methodology.
Schema 2025: Design Systems for a New Era! And How I Achieved Pixel-Perfect (Figma-to-Code)
Hello! I decided to rework this article from Figma into Russian to share key insights from Schema 2025. I added my thoughts and a section on how to achieve pixel-perfect translation of a design from Figma to code using tools including MCP with Cursor. Here is my version of the retelling.
How I Closed My Web Studio in Russia and Transitioned to a Solo Business
My name is Renat Usmanov, and I'm a full-stack Senior Product Designer. Until 2022, I spent eight years developing the web studio YAPPIKS LLC in the Russian region. Then I decided to close the service company and transition to a different style of work—solo. This isn't about freelancing "little by little," but rather focusing on developing myself as an independent team player, taking responsibility for results, and building a system around myself that doesn't require an office or staff.