What we do, who we are, and how we do what we do

Web things optimised for Human Behaviour.

We make great web apps, sites, and doodads by caring about the humans at the other end of the internet.

The internet is made of people. Someone clever said that. We help our clients achieve their goals online by focusing on stuff that their sites’ users care about; by treating visitors like they’re smart but busy. It’s based on a simple premise: if we understand a site’s users — their needs and motivations — we can honour their expectations and help our clients achieve their goals.

It’s not about bells and whistles either. 4thought.tv frequently tops Channel 4’s community charts for comments, because we built a simple site that lots of people like to visit every day.

We also helped an independent sports shop around the corner to achieve a 6-figure online turnover in their first year by listening to their visitors.

Don’t get us wrong — our clients were already great before we came along. We just helped them connect with their users a bit better.

Brands that some people really love.

We help brands (new and established) discover what they care about, then find 100, 1000 or 1,000,000 customers who care too.

It’s easy to build brands that nobody hates and nobody particularly loves either. To make something truly remarkable, we’re going to have to choose an audience.

The future belongs to those who doggedly pursue their chosen people, then grow from there. As almost every industry approaches unlimited choice, the old, safe way — making OK products that everyone thinks are OK — just doesn’t work anymore.

So, for example, we helped our friends at sugru sell out of their first 3000 packs in 16 hours of trading online, by being themselves and finding an audience that loves what they do.

Then there was the time when we helped our videographer friend triple his prices and double his new business by creating a trustworthy brand that his customers could really care about.

We also helped the Good Little Company go from a good idea to a world-changing food brand championed by Waitrose.

Again and again, we’re proud to help out clients prove that remarkable companies who treat people well can make customers for life.

Cunning schemes that make The People happy.

We combine the best of the web and real life, to build cross-platform experiences that make peoples’ socks roll up and down.

We use principles from Game Design to make elaborate schemes that people enjoy, on the web and in real-life. For example, we raised more than £10,000 (and counting) for Oxfam in an afternoon by writing peoples’ names on pieces of toast. (Seriously). In 2009, we directed more than a million visitors to Kiva.org using $500 and some fake beards.

By buildling-in remarkability, we saw Artwiculate, our Twitter-based word-of-the-day game grow from 70 to 5000 players in a single day.

Earlier this year, we helped Build Conference sell out of tickets in 12 hours by adding a single line of text to their order page. (And built the custom ticketing system that took all of those orders at once without a hiccup.)

Right now, we’re working on an interesting project involving mass participation with live TV, and something a little bit special for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

Stuart Johnston

Development & Strategy

Stuart brings a wealth of technical skill, creative ability and commercial awareness to each project. From heavyweight web applications to elaborate cross-platform campaigns, Stuart leads our team from inkling to execution.

Peter Kerr

Strategy & User Experience

Pete helps our clients start the right projects by joining the dots between their goals, values and actions. Then, by caring about end users, he leads our team in designing user experiences that people enjoy.

Karys Wilson

Visual & Process Design

Karys is an exceptional visual & process designer with an unusual talent for understanding how things work, pulling them apart and making them better. She’s an experienced art director and illustrator too.

Heather Kerr

Visual Design & Interestingness

Heather is a talented designer, illustrator and animator with a trophy cabinet to prove it. From the beginning of each project, she makes sure that our work has interestingness* built in.

*This isn’t a real word.

Alan Stirling

Development & Testing

Alan is a precise, meticulous developer specialising in designing complex systems, and making it look easy. Alan is a certified Prince2 project manager too, which is handy. In short, he’s great at hard stuff.

We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all processes, but we do have an approach to our work. We call it Responsible Design.

Actual honesty

We don’t lie to our clients and we don’t lie for our clients. We’re tactful, sure, but always honest. It’s a refreshing change in our industry and makes things much much simpler from day one.

Shared success

We only take on projects that we actually, (honestly) want to see succeed, independent of money. It means we’ll be a part of your team, and not just another supplier.

Positive net effect

We only take on projects that create a positive net effect. It might sound a bit worthy, but every project we take on has some impact on the world we live in, and we’d prefer ours to be positive.

Money as a tool

We see money as a way of being freed up to do great work. This subtle difference means a fundamental shift in how we think about each project we take on. We know we’re not cheap, but we make sure we’re good value for money.

Collaboration/expertise

We’re working (and training) hard to make sure we’re the best in the business, but we can’t be the best at everything. If we’re not the best people for the job, we’ll partner up or refer you elsewhere. We only work with highly trusted partners who will treat our clients with respect.