Cognigy
Software

Designing the Interface for the N1 Leader in Conversational AI

Cognigy.AI

Art Direction
Brand Design
Product Design
User research
UX/UI
Design System

2020

Cognigy.AI
Branding & Product Design Germany
Conversational Design

Credits
Art Direction / Naiara Odriozola
Head of UX/UI Design / Naiara Odriozola
Junior Designer / Paul Kriszan
Agency / think moto

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Cognigy is an enterprise software provider for Conversational AI automation. The platform, Cognigy.AI automates customer and employee communications. Its goal is to enable companies to create smooth human-like conversations with their users on any channel: webchat, SMS, voice and mobile apps.

We were commanded to rebrand and redesign the Cognigy.AI platform and update it with its new functionalities. It made us very excited about this project and to accompany Cognigy on their journey from a startup to an enterprise-level SaaS, like Google Dialogflow and IBM Watson. This evolution should be reflected in the design.

The product branding
Growing up without losing its edge

From startup to enterprise, the new visual identity had to feel serious and mature without losing Cognigy's modern tech edge. I set of artboards were developed for our client to set up the direction of the design we would follow. To convey the new designs we decided for a bolder and lighter color palette and a accessible minimalistic typography. Together with the general styles and look and feel, we developed a set of logos for the different softwares Cognigy offers as well as a new set of icons.

The user experience
Turning our user's wishes into new features

The previous Cognigy.AI experience relied on rigid structures with limited opportunity. The UX strategy consisted in building a new, flexible architecture that integrated with the existing infrastructure and enabled the new features Cognigy required to evolve as a software. After a discovery workshop with our clients where we gathered all valuable input from both stakeholders and users to start the UX/Design Sprint. We turned this requests into flows, which we then transformed into full wireframes. The guiding principles of this sprint were to create a seamless experience by collecting all previous problems and implement new features requested by the users.

The user experience
Our customers become smarter

It was also important to ensure a more user-friendly navigation of the platform. The new features had caused the user interface to become larger and more complex. We integrated them into the navigation to be easily found and also reworked the node-based logic. As a result, the new UX logic allows customers to get smarter about their own internal systems, helping create efficiencies and improving overall their business performance.

The user interface
Powerful under the hood, effortless on the surface

Cognigy is complicated, but it shouldn't feel that way. Its users come from diverse backgrounds and some may not be as digital fluent as the others. We made sure everybody has a fair start. The main goal of the redesign was the improved customization to fit customer brands more closely as well as the inclusion of more recent technologies, such as generative content and synthetic avatars. In some cases, we refreshed the look and optimized the user experience based on the customer feedback. But in others, we tackled the problem from the ground up to simplify the over-engineered experience. ‍At the same time, we gathered the main branding elements to create a small design guideline for the MVP.

The design system
Defining the atomic design

A further Design System with micro-animations completed the package that was handed to the development team. As the app will continue to grow with more functions in the future, we designed the interface using a module system that can be expanded whenever necessary. We had the advantage that we knew the tool and it’s strengths and weaknesses inside-out and were happy to make future projects easier for ourselves by improving the usability and intuitiveness of the node-based editor and other core features.

Cognigy's Continued Innovation
Shaping the Future of Customer Interaction

Subsequent projects for Cognigy included the development of a product and naming system as they expanded their feature set, and the redesign of the out-of-the-box webchat widget, that a lot of their customers, such as Lufthansa and Allianz, were using with until then limited capabilities of customization. Thanks to the Cognigy AI redesign, we were able to provide advanced customization options that more accurately reflect each customer’s brand, all while incorporating the latest technologies for improved performance and flexibility.