Driven
by Curiosity

Ciarán Harris | Portfolio

Ciarán Harris

Product builder, AI designer and design leader. I founded CogniStream.ai, AI-powered qualitative research through voice interviews. Before that I was a founding director of Each&Other, and the last founder to leave.

Impact-maker and a seasoned technology leader, product strategist and team creator, I am driven by curiosity. I have pioneered early technologies for mobile picture messaging, mobile gamification, commercial IoT products and AI-led research, pushing the boundaries of possibilities.

Award winning Principal UX Designer and Design Director, and holder of two international patent applications for user interface design. I take pride in delivering the best end-to-end solution possible and I thrive on making the complex simple.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ciaranharris

Ciarán’s consulting pillars & expertise

Partner Strategy

When you need world-class UX to succeed at scale.

North Star strategy and product vision
Large scale, big impact programmes
Upstream & downstream partners: agencies, media orgs, transformation consultancies, big dev houses
Embedded onsite in client’s multi-disciplinary teams (BNP Paribas, Fenergo, Vodafone, SSE)

Design Leadership

When you need to build, grow or steer a design function.

Building and leading multi-disciplinary design teams
Design Director and founding director experience
Embedding Design Thinking in engineering-led companies
Product strategy & scaling, from pre-launch start-ups to enterprise
Designing AI-powered products

Principal UX
Research & Design

When you need to understand your customers, and design for them.

Qualitative research, including AI-powered voice interviews to get actionable insights
User testing (Google, Aviva, Cornmarket)
User journey mapping (Salesforce, KBC)
End-to-end product design, from research to launch
UX & UI design for web, mobile, enterprise and connected products
AI design: CogniStream.ai, full product development superpowered by AI

CogniStream.ai

Qualitative research without the bottlenecks

I founded CogniStream.ai out of frustration with human-led research. Recruiting, scheduling, moderating and analysing interviews by hand made qualitative research expensive and slow: insight came at a high cost, at a small scale, and often after decisions were already made.

My vision was an AI researcher that holds natural voice conversations with real customers, at scale, and turns them into evidence-backed insight in hours or days, not months. I set the vision, designed the product, and brought together the team that built and delivered it. It’s built as a modular layer on top of the AI models, so as the technology improves, the best new models can be swapped in with minimum fuss.

Voxi, our AI voice interviewer, runs in-depth one-to-one interviews in multiple languages, picks up 54 emotional expressions in people’s tone of voice, and links every insight to the exact quote and moment it came from.

For participants it couldn’t be easier: there’s no app to download. They tap a link, it opens in their phone’s browser, and they simply have a chat.

▶ See Ciarán explaining CogniStream to MassChallenge

Ciarán on stage at the Digital Marketing World Forum, presenting CogniStream’s AI Voice Researcher

CogniStream.ai × Tate & Lyle

Taking sensory research remote

Tate & Lyle came to us through MassChallenge. In 2024 they ran their annual sensory testing as focus groups: 150 people at two sites in the USA and two in Germany. They wanted remote testing for secondary markets like the UK and Spain, validated first against that study.

Participants collected four cracker samples and a sheet with a QR code, and our AI interviewer guided them through each one in their phone’s browser: look, taste, first bite, mouthfeel, what was left in their teeth, and an overall rating. Four tasting-order segments ruled out order bias.

The result: qualitative sensory testing in secondary markets, at a fraction of the cost.

159one-hour interviews in 2 languages, in 4 locations in 2 countries (USA, Germany)

10 daystotal from start to finish of the research project

English (USA) and German (Munich & Hamburg). No human-led team could deliver this in 10 days.

A CogniStream taste-test sheet for Tate & Lyle: a QR code and instructions above a wrapped sample

CogniStream.ai × TBWA\ / Omnicom

Better research, in a fraction of the time

TBWA became our first customer after meeting us at Web Summit. We’ve run research for them both inside TBWA and with their clients. As Ed Leamy, Director of Innovation for Omnicom Western Europe, puts it, a project that once tied up a senior researcher for 10 days now takes that researcher 2 hours with CogniStream, with better outputs.

For the marketing team of one of Ireland’s pillar banks, the study link went out on Monday morning, the research ran Monday and Tuesday, and TBWA played back the findings on Wednesday afternoon.

Insights from one study were instrumental in rescuing TBWA’s relationship with an international building materials provider.

“What excites me isn’t just the tech. Now I can run proper research without the delays & drama, giving us faster insights that lead to stronger ideas. Just press go.”

Ed Leamy, Director of Innovation, Omnicom Western Europe

$TBWA\$

Google

Debunking the barriers to adoption of Google Ads

Multi-year engagement, encompassing data driven customer insight and in-depth qualitative customer research, exploring purchasing decisions for online ads.

Bringing a consumer-centric approach to delivering Google’s core B2B2C revenue generating engine, Google Ads, to inform product strategies and design decisions and iterations.

This work has won internal awards for the Google Ads team.

Award WinningInternal awards for the Google Ads team

Zurich Middle East

Rebuilding Zurich’s broker and customer platforms

New regulation in Dubai meant Zurich Middle East had to replace the platform its brokers use to sell life and savings products to expat clients, some of whom invest more each month than most people earn in a year. I led the redesign from the ground up.

We interviewed 20 brokers and ran mock quote sessions to find every bottleneck, then I designed lean flows that ask only what moves the price, built on digital ID checks and automated underwriting, both new to Zurich. Most quotes now take under 2 minutes, against a 5-minute target. 92% of applications go straight through automated underwriting, and a policy goes live in under a day, down from weeks.

I also redesigned their customer portal. Most of its journeys used to end with a Capgemini agent confirming details with the customer by phone; we made them digital end to end.

The Chief Commercial Officer started the project sceptical of design. By the end, he said he would never run a programme of that scale again without designers having a real voice in the room.

The redesigned My Zurich customer portal: open service requests and policy values

Fenergo

Scaling up a world class financial service enterprise app

I played a pivotal role in steering the product design through the entire development lifecycle, from research to design and launch.

Fenergo were undergoing a fundamental overhaul of the application backend & architecture, and they wanted a modern, clean and usable interface to go with it.

The world of KYC, AML & Dodd Frank is inherently complex. My challenge was to make the complex simple. Their customer panel loved it.

Key results included a +30% YOY B2B sales increase, and sales to new institutions such as RBS, Westpac, BNP, and Bank of China.

Drove internal engagement using Design Thinking methodologies to establish the importance of design in an engineering led company.

+30%YOY B2B increased sales

Honeywell

Connecting online and offline with smart sensors

I pioneered an industry-first smart solution, and award winning user experience for the mobile application and the physical interaction of Honeywell’s Sensepoint connected commercial & industrial gas monitors.

Speed and simplicity were key. Reports generated in seconds. Streamlined calibration of devices and simplified ongoing maintenance, boosting service engineer efficiency by 20 times.

“Next week calibrating 40 sensors will take me & my partner all week. If I had this I could do them all, by myself, in just one afternoon.”

Gas Engineer, user testing, Netherlands

Honeywell video at http://bit.ly/2n6EuPa

Honeywell Sensepoint app and gas detector

Breaking new ground with Smart Lighting

Spearheaded the end-to-end delivery of a cloud-based smart lighting and energy efficiency system for worldwide Intel & Accenture facilities.

A smart solution catering to multiple users and their needs:

electricians installing & commissioning the SMCs & Luminaires
facilities managers optimising workspaces
energy managers optimising electricity spend
workers controlling their local lighting & environment

Video at https://bit.ly/4ifd2ad

Cisco Case Maker

Empowering Cisco's global sales teams

I led the design team that enabled Cisco’s internal services team to automate and streamline global sales and increase productivity.

Customer facing sales agents use the tool to justify capital expenditure of Cisco infrastructure, by calculating in real-time the customer’s ROI and investment payback time.

90%reduction in ROI modelling costs

InstantROI reports, down from 2 weeks to real-time

Goodyear Dunlop Tires Europe

Leading Goodyear’s digital transformation

The introduction of the EU tire label regulation required tire manufacturers to make ratings available for every tire model & size they produced.

Goodyear used this opportunity to overhaul their B2C & B2B digital channels. I led the team & designs, launching their 4 key brands, each in 36 languages off the one codebase.

I moved GDTE away from decentralised silos, non mobile optimised, inconsistent site architecture & hundreds of microsite. I redesigned their digital ecosystem, using a user centric approach to redesigning purchase funnels & buyer journeys that were SEO & mobile optimised, with a full analytics reporting platform for introduction of KPI management. On the backend we introduced a common architecture & single CMS, DAM and localisation platform.

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Ciarán Harris

Let’s talk

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ciaranharris

Drivenby Curiosity

Ciarán Harris

Ciarán’s consulting pillars & expertise

When you need world-class UX to succeed at scale.

When you need to build, grow or steer a design function.

When you need to understand your customers, and design for them.

Qualitative research without the bottlenecks

Taking sensory research remote

Better research, in a fraction of the time

Debunking the barriers to adoption of Google Ads

Rebuilding Zurich’s broker and customer platforms

Scaling up a world class financial service enterprise app

Connecting online and offline with smart sensors

Breaking new ground with Smart Lighting

Empowering Cisco's global sales teams

Leading Goodyear’s digital transformation

Ciarán Harris

Driven
by Curiosity