Data modeling, made flexible.
Cognite (Oslo, Norway) is a technology company that builds and supports solutions for the oil and gas industry.
Working closely with the client, we designed a module for their flagship platform, focused on flexible data modeling. A data model lets users define the shape, structure, and expected behavior of their data. It underpins everything built on top of it — from data science models to mobile and web applications — as well as ontologies, knowledge graphs and industry standards.
Design problem
The central challenge was to let non-technical users model large-scale databases efficiently, through a graphical interface intuitive enough to stand in for writing code.
The tool itself is deeply advanced — it handles industrial-scale data models, relationships and constraints that would normally be written by hand by an engineer. Our job was to make all of that power feel extremely simple, so that someone with no technical background could sit down and build a working model on their own.
To get there, we designed an experience people already know from Google Docs and Excel: familiar tables and cells, direct editing in place, and changes that appear instantly. Nothing had to be learned from scratch — the interface borrows patterns users have been fluent in for years.
We backed every decision with a large amount of user testing, running session after session with real users until we were confident that everyone — technical and non-technical alike — understood what they were looking at and what to do next.
Built on Cognite’s design system
“Cognite’s branding and design system were already in place, and they were genuinely good — mature, consistent, properly documented. That let us put the whole project into the hard interaction problems instead of the surface. A pleasure to design inside.”
Michał Gryczka, Designer
The brand was already excellent
The marks are built from a handful of repeating geometric forms, so every one of them reads as part of the same family. We could lean on that for structure instead of inventing a second visual language next to the product.
The palette is just as considered — a warm, muted base with a small set of accents that never fight each other, and every value written down to the hex. It carries a dense, data-heavy interface without ever getting loud.
Brand system by Cognite. Product design by Lab1.