How Anna Zhikhareva Keeps Her Whole Design Project in View with Opal

Anna Zhikhareva is a freelance experience designer at AZX Design. Switching between separate pages and tools made it hard to keep the holistic view of a project. In Opal she structured her project information on one visual desk without the cognitive overload, and she says there was no learning curve.

Anna Zhikhareva
Freelance Experience Designer
AZX Design

See how Anna set up their desk · Read the transcript

Customer: Anna Zhikhareva, AZX Design
Business: Freelance experience design
Uses Opal for: Structuring a design project's documents, notes and links in one visual view
Opal features: Binders, Fences

Before Opal

Anna Zhikhareva is a freelance experience designer at AZX Design. Her main home for projects was Notion, where she built pages inside pages, and that suited her when she worked alone. Once the work became collaborative, switching between pages added friction. When a project needed visuals, she moved over to Canva and connected the two with links, and keeping the big picture of the project got harder.

How Anna set up their desk

Anna starts by drawing on paper how she wants a project arranged. Then she moved everything into one workspace in Opal: her material from Notion and Canva, plus the links and ideas a collaborator had sent her. She matched each kind of material with how she wanted to store it, using documents, binders and fences. She laid it out by asking what would be the most seamless way to guide her team through the project on a shared screen.

What changed

When Anna opens her workspace she sees the whole project, zooms in on the part she needs, and gets there with fewer clicks. Seeing the big picture all the time makes her feel on top of things, and she says it makes her project feel feasible. There was no learning curve for her.

Before Opal

Anna Zhikhareva is a freelance experience designer at AZX Design. For her projects, Notion was home base. She would sketch a plan on paper, then build chapters as pages inside pages, zooming in further and further. Working alone, that made sense to her.

Things changed once the work became collaborative. Switching between pages created friction, and that friction hurt most on vision-led projects without a clear plan.

When a project needed visuals, she jumped to Canva and connected everything with links. She didn’t mind switching tools, but with Notion and Canva she couldn’t get the one thing she wanted.

“I just want to have big picture and small aspects in one view.”
Anna Zhikhareva

How Anna set up her desk

Anna starts away from the screen. She takes time to think, then draws on paper how she wants the project arranged.

Then she moved everything into one workspace in Opal: what she had in Notion and Canva, plus a batch of links and ideas a collaborator had sent her. Much of it was a loose mix of visuals and text.

She matched each kind of material with the way she wanted to store it, using documents, binders and fences. Her guide for the layout was simple: if she shared her screen to walk the team through the project, what would be the most seamless path?

It clicked when she saw that the plan in her head could go straight onto the desk.

“I always had to compromise my vision to fit the structure, but here it just supported my vision.”
Anna Zhikhareva

She was already familiar with notes and documents. A fence took one beat: she wrote herself a note that she didn’t know what it was, then realized what it was for and deleted the question.

What changed

When Anna opens her workspace, she sees the whole project, then zooms in on the part she needs. Finding something takes fewer clicks than working down through nested pages, and less thinking about where it lives.

The bigger change is how the project feels to her.

“It makes me think my project is very feasible. And I’m, I’m on top of things.”
Anna Zhikhareva

She puts that down to seeing the big picture all the time. She knows what needs to be done, and she says she feels confident.

“Having the big holistic view of the project is the most important thing for me. Opal let me structure a lot of information in a way that makes it convenient without the cognitive overload. And there was no learning curve.”

Anna Zhikhareva
AZX Design

Set Up Your Desk

Read the full interview transcript

But once we started to work with John, it's more collaborative work, I notice how very much I have to kind of maybe have frictions in collaboration because I'm switching between the pages. And that's not ideal, because for especially vision-related project or more chaos project that doesn't have a clear roadmap, you would rather have as little friction as possible, switching between different things and figuring out what to do, going through different areas of the project.

And once I'm faced with bigger requirements to deal with projects, not only pages or text descriptions, but rather visualization, maybe creating some schemes, like a visual representation of information. I found myself jumping to Canva, which has more of a design-based tool, and then I just was connecting the links. So it's kind of like I don't mind working like that, jumping between tools, but I understand when you have more collaborative work, you don't want to have friction, you want to minimize those.

And with Notion and Canva, whether I use them individually or together, it's not possible. So this is where I think Opal comes into place, because even though you also have the idea of storing the links and jumping maybe to external sources, but you still keep the holistic view of different aspects of the project. And I think that's at least I see the most of the value of Opal. And once I realized that I can put it in Opal and Opal delivers, it's not like the particular feature.

It's just whatever I had in my mind and whatever I had like here in my notes of like how I want things to be for this project, I just realized I actually can have it right here. Like I didn't have that with other platform, like with other tools, I always had to compromise my vision to fit the structure, but here it's just supported my vision, just made it visual, tangible, and clear. So what I had in my mind was on this canvas in a structured way. So that's when it clicked.

Yeah. Let's just move to Opal. It works. I think I was surprised that you can achieve this view and this structure with, I think, limited items and tools. So you have essential tools. And with Opal, I didn't need to learn anything because the items that you have, I'm already familiar with. Note, document, text, video, or the fence was super easy to bind. It just was intuitive and easy to understand what it was for.

I remember even making a note, oh, I don't know what the fence is. And then, oh, of course. Yeah, I got it. So I immediately removed that question. To be honest, I must tell you it did. In a way, it makes me think it's possible.

It makes me think my project is very feasible.

And I'm on top of things. That's how it makes me feel. I think it's because I see the big picture all the time. And I think that's what makes me think I'm on top of things. And the project, it's feasible. There's progress. I know what needs to be done. I'm confident. That's the feeling I have with Opal.

By Chevas A. F. Balloun · Published October 27, 2026

© Opal Recall LLC. All rights reserved.

Chevas A.F. Balloun

Opal Operator