Your Product, Service or Experience, Made Exceptional with Human Centred Design

You’re building a product, service or experience and you want it to be exceptional (and safe, high-performing, engaging, easy-to-use, compliant, efficient and more ). But where to start, or how to finish?

With a Small Giant’s worth of Human Centred Design support, delivered by a friendly and engaging team with twenty years experience in research, mapping and design for complex systems.

13 years

Cognitive Ink was co-founded in 2013 to bring the best of psychology, business analysis and systems thinking to bear on Human Centred Design.

165+ projects

Award winning projects in engineering, banking, insurance, financial services, manufacturing, software systems, healthcare, logistics and more.

70+ clients

Clients include government, startups, NGOs and commercial organisations across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and the US.

Melbourne based

Based in Melbourne, serving clients across Australia and beyond.

Our services

  • User Research

    Learn what your customers, users, employees, citizens or other stakeholders need. And what it means to you. Real humans matter. If you're building something for humans, you want it informed by humans and designed by humans.

    Using: Policy research, Experience evaluations, Usability testing, Ethnography and Interviews.

  • Mapping & Design

    A picture paints a thousand words. See how your future service and experience works better using visual maps, prototypes and cost-effective ways of bringing experiences to life.

    Using: Journey mapping, Service design, Business modelling, Process analysis, Prototyping

  • Facilitation & Capability Building

    The team that pulls together, pulls far. We enrich your team when taking on new challenges with helping everyone up-skill and get on the same page.

    Using: HCD Training, Facilitation, New Ways of Working, Prioritisation and Storytelling.

Co-founders with twenty years of Human Centred Design experience

Christopher is a Researcher, Experience and Service Designer. He holds a Masters in Psychology (Honours) and a postgraduate Certificate in Human Factors.

Christopher spent years with some of Australia’s first Usability and Experience Design (UX) companies before founding Cognitive Ink in 2013.

We start small and scale to meet the needs of the project, using a network of expert partnerships, built over decades.

Anna is a Business Analyst and Service Designer. A specialist in bridging technology with business and regulatory environments, Anna spent a decade as a Lead IT Business Analyst at the investment banks Babcock & Brown and Macquarie Bank, before joining Christopher to create Cognitive Ink.

A qualified lawyer, Anna holds a Bachelor of Laws (focusing on Business Law) and a Master of Laws (Honours) (focusing on Technology Law), as well as Certifications in Business Analysis and Financial Analysis.

“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

Trusted by leading Australian organisations

Past projects

Featured
Who Are Our People? Learning About the Different Types of Employees in Engineering Consulting.
Who Are Our People? Learning About the Different Types of Employees in Engineering Consulting.

On behalf of an Australian-based global engineering and advisory firm, we interviewed dozens of potential, present and past staff members to dig down deep into what matters to people at work, and how lifestyle choices affect career choices. We uncovered key behavioural drivers and challenges from the perspective of several types of employees. 

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Can You Start Monday? A Candidate Hiring Experience That Rewards, Whatever the Outcome
Can You Start Monday? A Candidate Hiring Experience That Rewards, Whatever the Outcome

Competitive job markets make employee recruitment a challenge. Some employers focus on volume of candidates, but visionary employers want the candidate hiring process to be rewarding, no matter the outcome. We worked with an Australian engineering and advisory firm to identify opportunities to create a better candidate experience. 

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Avocados or Carrots? Creating a Neo-bank That Cares How Young People Think and Manage Money
Avocados or Carrots? Creating a Neo-bank That Cares How Young People Think and Manage Money

In partnership with an Australian financial organisation, we set out to discover how everyday Millennials and GenX manage their money. This included moves between apps, banks and accounts, as well as their short-term and long-term thinking that underpins their money life. Money for these overlapping generations can be mercurial—both a liberation and a prison. 

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How’s My Money Going? Using Software To Create More Meaningful Financial Advice Reviews
How’s My Money Going? Using Software To Create More Meaningful Financial Advice Reviews

In partnership with one of Australia’s leading providers of financial advice software, we dove deep into understanding the experience of carrying out financial advice reviews. Sometimes treated as little more than a mandatory checkpoint, advice reviews are a key time to align the expectations of clients and the capabilities of advisers. 

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Cognitive Ink’s Fieldnotes

Bite-sized thoughts on Human Centred Design

Featured
The 1895 Montparnasse Train Derailment and Understanding the Human in the System
The 1895 Montparnasse Train Derailment and Understanding the Human in the System

The 1895 Montparnasse Train Derailment may be the most visually striking examples of its kind. Immortalised forever in the sepia-toned image that marks the event, it remains a classic example of how crucial it is to understand the human in context with the complex technological systems that surround them.

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70% of Innovation Transformations Fail
70% of Innovation Transformations Fail

It’s optimistic to think that all software, technology, innovation, and transformation projects intended to improve an organisation actually deliver their outcomes. After all, significant time, effort, and money are spent to make an organisation, or its products, services, and experiences, higher performing, efficient or more valuable. But after decades of observation, ~70% of transformation projects still fail to deliver their intended value. And the common reason they fail is because teams keep misunderstanding the Human Factor.

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Don’t put AI in the Driver’s Seat of a Human Centred Design Project
Don’t put AI in the Driver’s Seat of a Human Centred Design Project

If AI is the horse, the thing meant to do the work, then they should pull the cart, to wherever the driver specifies, not the other way around. The way to thrive, with a Human-Centred Design lens is to understand the human, system and organisational problems and solve outward to the technology. That way we can build the sort of future where organisations and the people they serve, both benefit. 

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Cognitive Ink’s Human Centred Design via our Pentad of Pathfinding Peregrinators
Cognitive Ink’s Human Centred Design via our Pentad of Pathfinding Peregrinators

Some years ago, we got the idea to think about Human Centred Design, not as a sequence of steps, stages or phases of activity, but as a set of characters in an epic story of design adventure.

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Explore more fieldnotes

Drop us a line

Send a message and we’ll book a no-obligation chat where we can get to know each other, exchange ideas and generally make sense of the fit.