Cognitive Ink Provides Human-Centred Design for Complex Products, Services & Experiences

Whether you want to improve an existing product, service or experience, or build something new, we provide expert human-centred design decision-making.

Cognitive Ink is a human-centred design company based in Australia and working internationally

Creating a better product or service is like exploring a vast landscape. There are rewarding vistas, many pathways to choose from, and occasionally treacherous terrain. It’s easy to spend time, money and attention building the wrong thing, or building the right thing, the wrong way. You need guides to take you on the human-centred journey towards better things.

Christopher and Anna each have twenty years of experience helping businesses build experiences that are safe, useful, usable, engaging, high-performing and valuable. You’ll love our evidence-based design approach, using on a deep understanding of human psychology, business and technology. It enables us to understand the most complex systems.

We work with you and the people who really matter: your customers, users, employees, citizens, stakeholders. We help you respond to what people really need from your product, service or organisation. It removes the guesswork, so that you can spend your time, effort and money designing and building what really matters.

That’s how you find your path to a better product, service or experience.

Meet your guides, Christopher & Anna, twenty year veterans in Human Centred Design

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.

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.

A sample of recent clients…

Ready to find your path to a better product, service or experience?

Drop us a line and we’ll get right back to you.

Not quite ready, but curious to learn more?

Explore our Cognitive Ink Fieldnotes—bite-sized journey entries from the field of Human Centred Exploration, Mapmaking and Design.