Services
We provide a high-quality and cost-effective User Research, Service and Experience Design outputs for product owners, managers, service leads and other key service makers
Our services are organised around our own in-house methodology: Cognitive Ink’s Mindset & Maps Experience Design. Via the five mindsets that anchor our approach, including: the Planner, Explorer, Mapmaker, Designer and Guide.
Our Planner organises work, selects methods and makes sure projects run smoothly
Reverse Brief: In order to ensure we’ve understood the triggers, constraints and scope of a project, we build a reverse brief the ‘plays back’ our understanding of the project.
Plans: We develop project plans suited to the business and development environment; be it agile or waterfall.
North Star: Collaborating with key stakeholders, we build a ‘North Star’ - a vision of what an exceptional end-state for the project looks like.
Budgets, Risks / Issues, Stakeholders & more: With formal project management training and experience, we develop the key minimum project management tools, like milestone-based budgets, risks / issue maps and tools to map out key stakeholders.
Our Explorer carries out the Design Research
Interviews & Ethnography: We talk with people face-to-face or remotely, to understand what it’s like to work with a specific problem, in a life situation, or to use a service or product. This can include meeting people in their homes, workplaces or out in the world. This leads to a better understanding of the context of a product or service, the problems to solve and people’s needs, which fundamentally shapes new solutions.
Expert reviews: Using our human factors and usability engineering expertise to conduct a criterion-based review of a product, service or experience, to understand how well it supports people. Finds tactical problems with an experience.
Usability tests: Carrying out a formal, performance focused test with real end-users of a product or service to understand how well they can complete their tasks.
Our Mapmaker bridges Design Research & Service Design
Personas: We integrate everything we’ve learned about the users, citizens, consumers or employees in focus, to develop a set of behavioral personas to guide teams on the people they’re designing for.
Themes & Insights: We synthesize all of our background research, interviews and onsite observations into a single, cohesive set of insights and themes that explain how and why people behave as they do, the challenges worth solving and the opportunities to solve them. The insights are the springboard to launch to innovation.
Big ideas: We use a range of best-practice techniques drawn from psychology and design to come up with Big Ideas to solve problems, improve experiences or potentially develop entirely new products and services.
Our Designer does Service Design and Experience Anatomy
Experience journeys & Service blueprints: We develop the end-to-end journeys and blueprints that define the entire product or service experience. This includes both front-of-houses user experiences and back-of-house systems, processes and policies.
High-level requirements: We gather the high-level requirements, expressed as feature bricks, jobs-to-be-done or user stories that help redefined existing features or catagloue new features.
Experience Anatomy: We develop the underpinning experience architecture models that provide crucial guidance for detailed design. These include workflows, object models, business rules and business models.
Concepts & Prototyping: We develop ‘rough-and-ready’ wireframe, Lego, cardboard, paper, clay, story-based, mock-video, poster and theatre based concepts and prototypes that let you get the earliest vision of your new product or service coming to life.
Our Guide supports and explains how to approach detailed design
Paper / Online / Video walk-throughs: We organise the outcomes of our research into a wide range of easy-to-read, digestible and distributable formats, including slideshows, online repositories and video walk-throughs that can be shared across an organsiation.
Presentations & Stakeholder forums: We provide presentations and stakeholder forums for any stakeholder (inside or outside the organisation), at any level, at any scale (from 1 person to 100s)
Training & Mentoring: We provide out-of-box training and mentoring on a wide range of research and design topics, from one-day sessions up to multi-year mentoring engagements.
