Principal Product Designer · Fintech · Trading · AI
Alexander Chernov, principal product designer. Fintech, trading systems and AI products. Moscow, since 2005. Twenty years of making complicated things simple. I designed systems for ATON, VTB, Raiffeisen and Renaissance Capital. Now I design and ship my own AI products, from the interface down to the model.
Case 01 · 2019–2023
A private digital platform for high-net-worth investors: expert content, investment ideas, messaging with advisers and an internal tool for preparing materials.
Case 02 · 2022 · NDA
An in-house platform for trading communication in options and futures: orders, portfolios, dense data and the scenarios of the whole desk in one system. Luxembourg.
Case 03 · 2021
Crypto options without the noise: the trade builder, the chart, the balance and the option types stay in view at once. Sweden.
These are three of eight. The rest, with the process and the design systems behind them, is in the portfolio.
See all work →Archive · 2005–2024
Half of my work is under NDA. I can describe it the way a weather forecast describes a storm. Banks, industry, investment and betting services, 2014–2024. There is always something I can show on a call. Book a call
I will not tell you that AI changes everything. I will show you a model running inside a law firm’s own network, updated every day. I built these products myself, from the idea and the interface down to the model and the code.
LLM · RAG · On-premise
An on-premise LLM for law firms, running inside the company’s own network. It pulls legal database updates every day and reads the firm’s internal systems. The data never leaves their hardware.
Demo on request →Voice AI
A voice agent for inbound and outbound calls. Speech recognition and dialogue logic at the front, a handover to CRM at the end. It stays on point and sounds human.
Demo on request →Product · PWA
An enterprise messenger: chats, calls, documents, a kanban board and an AI assistant. One product instead of five services, self-hosted in five minutes.
b8q.ru ↗AI media
A publication about artificial intelligence: models, deployment, safety and the market. Every piece is checked by an editor. There is a digest and a Telegram bot.
digestai.ru ↗Encyclopedia · CV
A herbal medicine encyclopedia with 534 plants. Blends and a harvesting calendar for each one. It recognizes a plant from a photograph.
fitopedia.ru ↗“Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.” Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World, 1971. It still ruins my Fridays.
A designer’s life is a constant fight. A fight against ugliness, the same way a doctor fights disease. Visual disease is what we have around us, and what we make treats it, one way or another.
Design is where science and art reach a balance. That is why I do not choose between beauty and data. A decision has to be justified, and it has to be beautiful.
Burdock catches on fur with tiny hooks. That is where Velcro came from. The same principle holds blood pressure cuffs and the soles of astronaut suits.
Design needs a source. Mine is nature and the processes running inside it.
problem framing → from complex to simple → released functionality
Born in 1987. Sold my first website in 2005. It ran unchanged until 2019, which is either good design or a client who never called. Since then I have believed in design that outlives trends. I gather requirements, run research and interviews, then design and test on real data, without abstract personas and filler. I can code, and I talk to developers in their own language.
Digital products for the group’s asset management company: investment scenarios and the client paths through data and documents. Complex financial information written plainly, with states and errors that hold up against the regulatory limits. AI is part of the design process here: context digging, edge cases, UX writing, documentation.
I lead the UX/UI track in banking products and internal services at Raiffeisen Bank, the Russian arm of the Austrian group: scenarios and interface logic, plus the traffic between product, analytics and development.
A team of designers and researchers at VTB, Russia’s second-largest bank, in its corporate and investment business. I ran the hypotheses and the sprints, and the design reviews. UX research and tracking of how the bank’s internal systems performed.
A component design system built close to development at ATON, one of Russia’s largest independent investment houses. ATON Space, ATON Line, client portals, CRM, portfolio management and account opening. Customer journey maps and CX research. The client measured the result in NPS, and I never saw the raw numbers. Mentoring and growing the design team.
Building a strong design team. Banking and industrial clients, plus investment firms. Closed social networks, CRM, enterprise messengers, mobile apps, ATM screens, brand identity and industrial design.
From senior designer to art director of the studio. Client communication, project management, the main concepts and the direction of design work for Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil, Salesforce, Logitech, Kodak, JTI, AFP, Sanofi, Energizer, MTS and MegaFon and many others.
One of the most visited online hypermarkets in the Russian web. I was the only designer on it: A/B tests, email campaigns, usability work and the analytics behind them. Conversion 2.92% was the best in the category at the time. Revenue grew year over year while I was there. That is where I started to look at design through the revenue of the company.
A German maker of underfloor heating and industrial heating equipment. Websites, packaging, industrial design, and a great many presentations and brochures. I saw the packaging again in 2023. It has not changed.
A website for a construction company. It made money for the owners and stayed unchanged until 2019. That is where all of this started.
Scenarios, screens and states of a product: a new section, a redesign of a service or an MVP. The kind of work that has many roles, limits, data and consequences.
You get flows · prototypes · UI · handoff
I take the interface apart scenario by scenario: where the user loses context and where the extra steps are. Then what that costs you in conversion.
You get problem map · priorities · a fix plan
Components, states, tokens and rules, so the team ships new screens faster, without visual noise and without drifting away from development.
You get components · tokens · documentation
An LLM inside your own network, RAG on your data, voice agents, an AI assistant in the product. I design it, build it and take it to something that works, the way I did with Black Cube.
You get architecture · prototype · rollout
I set up the design process and the team: reviews, mentoring, hiring, and the conversation with development and the business. I have done this in a studio and in banks.
You get process · reviews · a team that grows
Telegram · 1,100+ subscribers
A channel about AI and design: model walkthroughs, UX patterns, useful tools and the psychology of interfaces, plus philosophy, music and poetry. Most of those 1,100 readers are people.
Bonus hall · free entry
Instead of a PDF deck I built a three-dimensional museum of my own work: fifteen rooms from art deco to a neural garden, paintings in gilt frames, interactive exhibits, a cat named Versace in black onyx and two ducks. The interface is in Russian. WASD to walk, mouse to look, desktop only. The paintings need no translation.
RU interface · WASD + mouse · desktop only
I answer within one business day · Moscow, UTC+3 · four to six hours from New York, full overlap with London
