Cognitive Ink are your Human Centred Design Guides.

We help you find a path to an incredible product, service, experience or entire system.

And it starts with people.

Meet your guides, Christopher & Anna, twenty year veterans in HCD

Small-but-mighty, Christopher and Anna are the heart of Cognitive Ink. We assess, manage, and provide the core work on any project. When required, we scale via a hand-selected team.

Christopher is a Researcher, Experience and Service Designer. He focuses on people, their behaviour and context to create systems that work for people. He has a Masters in Psychology and a postgraduate Certificate in Human Factors. Prior to co-founding Cognitive Ink, he learned his craft with some of Australia’s first Usability and Experience Design (UX) companies in the early 2000s.

Anna, is a Business Analyst and Service Designer. She focuses on bringing business and technology together to create businesses that solve genuine problems for people, and to solve them well. She has a Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Laws (business law), Master of Laws (Honours) (technology law) and Certifications in Business Analysis and Financial Analysis. Prior to co-founding Cognitive Ink, Anna held lead roles as a Business Analyst and Service Designer for Babcock & Brown and Macquarie Bank in the 2000s.

“You two are the king and queen of design research. It’s not just about your insights, it’s how you lift them up and bring them into the business. You never fail to astound me.”

~Maureen Thurston

Acting Director of Design Factory at Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, Former Chief Experience Officer of Aurecon, and Chair Emeritus of Good Design Australia

Our Services

The Experience Auditor

Need to figure out what’s working, what’s not, and what’s interesting about an existing experience? The Experience Auditor can work out what’s going on, and what changes will make things better. Sometimes, the only thing you need, is a place to start.
Activities: Heuristic Evaluations, Usability Testing, Competitor Reviews.
The Human Centred Designer

Want to see what a future experience could be like, or, how a new technology could work? Engage the Human Centred Designer, the expert service that finds out who matters, what they need and why. The Designer translates needs into a vision of the future. This helps organisations make confident decisions about what to build, how to build it, and why it works.
Activities: User Interviews, Surveys, Personas, Experience Journeys, Service Blueprints, Prototyping.
The Business Analyst

Looking to find efficiencies in your current business, or, trying to work out how to build the future? Work with the Business Analyst to untangle requirements, processes, systems and technology. Build out your product-feature pipelines to get you from today to tomorrow.
Activities: Process Modelling, Requirements Writing, User Stories.
The Innovation Guide

Need to figure out how to get to the right future, based on where you are today? Go with the Innovation Guide, who helps you build new ways-of-working. As well as providing stakeholder facilitation to get everyone onto the same page during a detailed design and development.
Activities: Stakeholder Workshops, Facilitation, Presentation, Storytelling.

Get the facts

Fact #1: Human Centred Design (HCD) is a practical approach to making incredible experiences, and it starts with real people’s needs

Whether you’re dealing with pen-and-paper processes, face-to-face services, complex digital systems or the most cutting-edge AI technology, it doesn’t matter. People will be somewhere in that loop: giving instructions, receiving outputs, being affected by automation or controlling the whole experience. Which is why we start with people.

Fact #2: HCD avoids wasting time and money, or creating in-world mistakes, by testing ideas and technology early

It avoids building the wrong thing, or, building the right thing, the wrong way. The goal of HCD is to deliver experiences that are safe, useful, usable, engaging and valuable to the organisation that hosts them. And it ties outcomes to clear measures of better performance, reduced errors, increased satisfaction, lower support costs and increased revenue.

Fact #3: Good HCD requires experienced guides

Cognitive Ink’s founders each have twenty years’ experience in multiple domains: banking, health, engineering, telco, government and more. Our formal training in psychology, design, law, finance and business analysis means we have the multidisciplinary skills to find our way through the most complex systems and advanced automations.

Fact #4: We’re the crucial guidance in the gap between back of the napkin vision and detailed design and development

Collaborating with us means leadership, product, UX, content, marketing and build teams can make confident decisions about what to build, how to build it, and why it works.

That’s what it means to do Human Centred Design well.

Since 2013, we’ve designed useful, usable, valuable and award-winning products, services and experiences for clients across the world

Short Facts

2013: Cognitive Ink was founded to bring the best of social science, system analysis, business optimisation and experience design and physical / visual thinking to bear on solving problems. It’s in our name, we Think in Ink.

165+ Projects: across domains spanning built environment, financial services, manufacturing, healthcare and logistics.

70+ Clients: We’ve helped businesses and government-funded organisations, startups and established well-known names. Our clients have spanned the global, including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and the US.

Award-winning: Key contributions to the transformational AMP Goals 360 program, which won several Good Design awards.