User-Centered Design for a Genuinely Useful AI Product

Irena leads product design research and strategy at Cognita. With a design background and 8+ years of experience across web and mobile products, she's spent her career translating real user behavior into interfaces that actually work — now applied to helping people trust and use AI in their daily work.

At the core of Irena's approach is deep respect for how people actually behave, not how we wish they would. She runs research to understand where people hesitate to trust AI-generated answers, and designs around that — clear citations, visible confidence, easy ways to double-check.

Irena's philosophy is straightforward: good AI design earns trust before it earns adoption. She advocates for transparency in every interaction, understanding that people need to see the reasoning before they'll rely on it.

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Irena combines strategic research with refined design thinking to shape how people experience AI at Cognita. Her work is grounded in usability, transparency, and genuine respect for the user's judgment. At Cognita, she helps build a product people trust, not just use.