> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://productengineers.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How Engineers Get Better at UX Design | Jon Yablonski (Mixpanel’s senior product designer) - URL: https://productengineers.com/episodes/season2/how-engineers-get-better-at-ux-design-jon-yablonski-mixpanels-senior-product-designer/ - Published: 2026-09-15T07:16:16.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-15T07:16:16.000Z - Description: Jon Yablonski, author of Laws of UX and senior product designer at Mixpanel, explains how software engineers can train their design eye, apply UX principles, and use AI while continuing to develop their own judgment. - Author: Jon Yablonski - Tags: #season-2, Why It Matters Jon Yablonski is a senior product designer at Mixpanel and the author of Laws of UX. In this episode, we explore how software engineers can get better at UX design through observation, practice, and collaboration, starting with the products they already use and love. --- Listen on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fHOC4DSMhY&ref=productengineers.com), [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/0vTw0vHID8LzAK7K67y9dj?si=f8306c499be24ade&ref=productengineers.com) or [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/it/podcast/the-product-engineers-podcast/id1836853484?l=en-GB&i=1000789728205&ref=productengineers.com) --- ### In our conversation, we discuss: 1\. Why UX design goes beyond appearance and why design skills are trainable 2\. How engineers can develop a design vocabulary and learn by studying everyday products 3\. Tesler’s Law: balancing engineering complexity, user effort, and product trade-offs 4\. Jakob’s Law: when familiar interface patterns help and when novelty makes sense 5\. Where AI helps with prototypes and design systems, and why critical thinking still needs practice ### Where to find Jon Yablonski: - [Website](https://jonyablonski.com/?ref=productengineers.com) - [Laws of UX](https://jonyablonski.com/work/laws-of-ux/?ref=productengineers.com) - [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-yablonski-b4269115/?ref=productengineers.com) --- ### Lessons Learned - Look beyond the screen. UX includes the system that supports an interface and the experience surrounding it. When evaluating a feature, consider what people need to understand, what work they have to do, and how the whole interaction leaves them feeling. - Learn a shared design vocabulary. An engineer saying that a screen feels overwhelming may be noticing the same problem a designer calls cognitive load. More precise language helps the team explain the concern, connect it to human behavior, and discuss possible improvements. - Study the products you already love. Ask what draws you to a product and why a particular interaction feels good. Pull the experience apart and reconstruct how it works from the user’s perspective. Repeated observation gives you specific ideas to discuss and practice. - Bring design and engineering together early. A finished Figma file can conceal technical constraints that only emerge during implementation. Close collaboration lets both disciplines shape the solution while there is still room to change it, and gives each person opportunities to learn from the other. - Use prototypes to explore how an idea behaves. Jon’s development skills let him test design concepts more deeply than a static interface could. Building a prototype can help a team understand an interaction and discuss the experience with something concrete in front of them. - Ask who will absorb the complexity. Tesler’s Law gives teams a way to discuss complexity that remains after a problem has been simplified. Reducing implementation effort can leave users with more work. Make that transfer visible when weighing engineering, business, and design constraints. - Consider whether a decision can be reversed. Trade-offs depend on the information and constraints a team has at the time. A choice that can be revisited creates different options from one that is difficult to undo. Include that distinction when deciding how much complexity to take on now. - Use familiar patterns where people want to finish a task. An online checkout is usually a poor place to ask customers to learn a novel interface. Jakob’s Law helps explain why familiar conventions can make the buying process easier, while the product itself provides the novelty. - Find opportunities by comparing existing experiences. Study the patterns similar products share, then look closely at their differences. Ask which differences help and where a useful approach seems to be missing. That research can reveal opportunities for novelty instead of forcing an unusual design for its own sake. - Protect the work that develops your thinking. Jon uses AI widely but keeps writing and early design exploration as activities he works through himself. An immediately plausible output can skip the iterations that reveal important details. Leave room to sketch, reconsider, and refine an idea before generating its implementation. - Choose tools for the stage of the problem. Pen and paper and Figma help Jon explore ideas and work through spacing, hierarchy, and other details. Once those decisions are established, especially within a design system, AI tools such as Claude Code can help him build prototypes quickly. - Keep design systems useful in day-to-day work. A design system needs ongoing maintenance and integration. Engineers can improve its connection to code, Storybook, and AI tooling, or build tools that help the team evaluate interface patterns. Those contributions make the team’s shared design knowledge easier to apply.