Yan Hladchenko – Product Designer

Product Designer based in Budapest. Currently building PDF Expert. I care deeply about craft and the little interactions people remember.

PDF Expert

Raiffeisen Bank

Side Projects

CVLinkedIn X Instagram

Yan Hladchenko as a child, from a 1997 home video

Yan Hladchenko in front of the Sagrada Família

Mariupol, 1997Barcelona, 2026

Dear visitor,

I’m Yan Hladchenko, a Product Designer originally from Mariupol, Ukraine.

After moving to Dnipro for university, I began my career in digital design. Today, I’m based in Budapest, Hungary – a new chapter that started when the war forced me to leave home.

Sports have always been a big part of my life. As a kid, I spent countless hours on football fields and tennis courts.

My first design project? Creating 3D football club logos in Photoshop and uploading them for FIFA and PES players. I didn’t know it then, but that small side project would eventually lead me to product design.

Today, I’m a Senior Product Designer at PDF Expert, building tools that make working with PDFs effortless.

Outside of work, you’ll usually find me playing tennis, shooting film photography, watching football, or exploring Budapest.

Product Designer based in Budapest. Currently building PDF Expert.
I care deeply about craft and the little interactions people remember.

⌘ K

Featured work

CVLinkedIn X Instagram

Homeyanhladchenko.com

This layout is inspired by the productivity tools I love and use every day.

Each project is a tab in the sidebar. Click one to open it, or keep scrolling to move through them. Use Search to jump straight to any project.

Looking for my experience? It's all in the CV.

Want to know more? Open the section. In short: I'm obsessed with design, love tennis, and support Tottenham Hotspur.

Click a tabOpens a project

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SearchJumps anywhere

Everyday Tools

PDF Expert

Tools like Convert, Notes and Stamps are among the biggest value drivers in PDF editing, and the features the market competes on. When I joined the team they didn't exist yet, so I had to build them.

I had a lot of ideas and hypotheses about how they could work, so I built a prototype in Claude Code and iterated until using the tools felt effortless — then handed that code to the developers.

The microinteractions make the process more delightful while staying practical and never wearing out their welcome, which matters in productivity tools.

ContributionsDesign, Development

Year2026

Web App Redesign

PDF Expert

When I joined the PDF Expert team, one of my first challenges was to redesign how the web app looks and feels.

I rebalanced the emphasis and the visual hierarchy, updated the color palette, and built it all so the design could scale.

As a result, key actions like Upload File carry more weight, and there's more focus on the documents people are actually working with. My goal was an interface that keeps people in flow, with nothing pulling at their attention.

While building it, I recreated the new design in code, which made it quick to validate ideas and sped development up.

This redesign became the foundation for every feature that followed — a turning point for the PDF Expert web app.

ContributionsDesign, Development

Year2026

Sign Up Revamp

PDF Expert

During my probation period at PDF Expert I got curious about how people actually used the product, so I started looking at the top-of-funnel analytics. One number stood out: only 27% of the people who pressed log in or sign up on the landing page ever made it into the product.

I took it on. Part of the problem was that you couldn't see anything of the product before you were inside it, so there was nothing to sign up for.

I worked on that at several levels: personalized, value-based copy that says what happens after you log in; a preview of the document you had just uploaded; the document itself showing through the interface behind the dialog; and clearer emphasis inside the sign-in window.

Since 80% of people sign in with Google, I also took the Continue with email button out — it now appears only once you interact with the email field.

Together these took the share of people who start the process and reach the product from 27% to 59%.

Completion rate27% → 59%

ContributionsDesign, Development

Year2026

Cash Loan

Raiffeisen Bank

Raiffeisen’s legacy loan flow buried the entry point and overwhelmed people with complex forms and unclear repayment information.

Working in the lending department, I built the lending experience from scratch: how cash loans are presented and where exactly they sit in the app, the application and repayment flows, and managing the loan itself.

I partnered with engineers and analysts, ran user interviews to find where people lost confidence, and tested each iteration before development.

The screens here follow the application: one question per step, the monthly repayment updating as you go, and a clear summary before signing.

Completion rate+31%

ContributionsDesign, Research

Year2025

Credit Card

Raiffeisen Bank

At Raiffeisen Bank we relaunched the credit card completely — what it was called, how it worked, and what using it in the mobile app would feel like. That last part was mine.

I spent a lot of time talking to customers and built the experience from scratch: opening a card, managing it and setting limits, repaying what you owe, and making it clear how the card actually works.

The screens here follow the repayment flow, from the reminder on the account screen through to the payment going out.

Against the old card it fixed a lot of what people had been struggling with, and the key metrics moved with it.

Card openings+29%

Card usage+24%

ContributionsDesign, Research

Year2025

yMeet

Side Projects

I got tired of constantly checking Google Calendar and email to see if a meeting was added, canceled, or moved.

So I built yMeet.

It lives in the menu bar and counts down to the next meeting, so there's nothing left to check. One click joins the call, and a notification arrives the moment anything moves.

ToolClaude Code

Year2026

Fix the PDF

Side Projects

I was exploring whether I could build a game, and I did. It's set in an imaginary world where you have to fix a PDF, talking to NPCs who help you along the way. My colleagues at PDF Expert are in there as characters – me included.

Writing the whole story and drawing the 2D arcade-style art was the best part.

ToolsClaude Code, ChatGPT Images 2.0

Year2026

Rolls

Side Projects

I built Rolls, an AI-powered app for organizing and preserving film scans, using Glaze for the Glaze Awards.

Drop in your scans, and they come back looking like they just left the lab – arranged into realistic film strips with sprocket holes and handwritten kraft labels. Rolls also analyzes the grain to guess the film stock, helping photographers rediscover forgotten details from their archive.

This project explores how AI can bring craftsmanship and delight to a niche workflow while solving a real problem for analog photographers.

ToolGlaze

Year2026

Lab

Side Projects

An image playground I built for experimenting with film-inspired looks.

Upload your own photo or start with a sample, then apply different film stocks to see how they transform the image.

ToolClaude Code

Year2026