Designing and building creative intelligence products and brands for humans
We build human-first products that treat the human side as seriously as the technical side. Interfaces that are conversational, systems that explain their reasoning, and AI technology that fits into how people actually work rather than forcing them to adapt.
For over 20 years, we've solving problems alongside teams at Google, IBM, Air New Zealand, Kpler, EE, News UK, Tesco, and The Economist, sitting in the space between product strategy and hands-on engineering, designing systems and shipping products that make the complex feel simple.
Emmly
Creative workflow product for briefs, references, and generative tools. We use it on our own work; Seedance through Gemini sit in the same pipeline.
Emmly
Workflow management for creative teams sitting on existing inspiration and work, wired into generative AI tools from Seedance to Gemini.
Mass
My mum thinks it's cool. My friends think it's as odd as a cat with wings. Getting human opinion is hard. It's time-consuming, expensive, and we're not sure we can trust the result. That's why we built Mass, a platform to deploy hundreds of synthetic human personas that think, reason, and respond like the target audience. They're brutally honest and unfiltered, giving a real sense of what audiences want in minutes, not months. And at a fraction of the cost. Understand perspectives, validate messaging, explore positioning, and more before committing to the real human research.
Mass
Desktop client for the same synthetic runs, backed by local LLM models so research stays on the machine.
Offpointe.studios
Brand, website, digital printing automation and e-commerce.
On the River
Maps for rivers and canals we use ourselves. Public waterways across Britain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Belgium: locks, clubs, channel guides, and route planning.
Beryl
E-commerce website for Beryl, a London-based bike light and transport company. Today, they support over 300,000 people using their bikes, e-bikes, e-scooters and cargo bikes to get to work, to university, and to explore.
Appo
Prototype build to help businesses automate customer support and sales for dental practices using AI and chatbots, with HIPAA-compliant data collection, storage, and insights.
Appo
FaultFixers
Identity for FaultFixers, a facilities maintenance company.
FaultFixers
Insight and strategy, product design, and thinking machines.
Helping organisations make sense of the world around them, then designing and building the response. Interfaces that feel conversational, systems that explain their reasoning, and technology that fits how people already work.
Insight and strategy
Decoding the behaviours and tensions shaping how people use AI products, tools, and brands. Then a clear recommendation: positioning, product direction, or the next thing to ship.
Product design and engineering
Designing the interface and writing the code that makes it happen. This is the core of our fractional consultancy work, and what we do every day.
Thinking machines
How people talk to it, how it reasons, how it fails, and how it stays in production. Not just designing the interface, but engineering products that make inference trustworthy.
Let's talk
If you're building a product and you need the human side of the engineering as well as the system, tell us what you're building and which services you need. Either reach out by email or feel free to book some of our time on our calendar.
hello@thingsthat.comWe're always honest about what we can and can't do. If we're not the right people for it, we'll tell you straight up. We have a large network of incredible designers, engineers and innovators, so if we're not the people, we'll know someone who is.