After twenty years building apps, we started an agency that doesn’t.

Affective is the psychological term for emotional response. The dictionary definition is "relating to moods, feelings, and attitudes". It's also a quiet pun on effective, which is the difference our work tries to make. The name is a statement of intent: every product we work on is judged by the emotional response it produces, not the visual one. We chose it because no other name we considered described the work as honestly.

A small senior team including Simon. The people you meet on the discovery call are the people doing the work. There are no junior teams learning on your project, no offshore handoffs, no project managers translating between you and the people thinking. We stay deliberately small because the work doesn't scale well by adding bodies. It scales by adding judgement.

Founders building their first product who know they'll only get one chance to launch it. Product teams trying to lift retention on a second or third release. Enterprise brands who've decided the next launch needs to be grounded in something more than instinct. The common thread is that the people we work with are usually treating the project seriously and want their thinking to match.

Anyone who wants the cheapest possible foundation work, anyone who wants us to validate a decision that's already been made, anyone whose timeline doesn't allow for the research to actually shape the design. We'll usually spot the mismatch on the discovery call and say so.

The collective experience runs to over two decades, all of it in mobile and web app design at the brand-and-enterprise end. Past clients include the Ministry of Defence, Chanel, Universal Music, Canon, and Lucozade, alongside dozens of funded startups, scale-ups, and challenger brands. We Are Affective is what happened when we distilled everything that work taught us about why apps succeed or fail into a single, focused practice.

Yes, it's ours. The Feel Factor draws on established work in behavioural psychology and emotional design, but the framework, the five dimensions, the library of structured exercises, the way it threads through a project from research to handover, is something we developed over years of practice. It's the discipline behind every project we run, and we're publishing the full thinking as a book later this year.

Selectively. Most client projects are confidential, and we won't break that to win a new pitch. The work that does end up public, the writing, the talks, the upcoming book, focuses on the methodology and the patterns we see across projects, not on individual cases. If you want to see how we think, that's where to look.

It means we don't take referral fees, kickbacks, or commission from any developer, agency, or technology provider. We don't have a preferred build partner, a stack we're trying to sell you, or a follow-on contract waiting on the other side. When we recommend an approach, the only thing shaping that recommendation is your project. The independence is a structural choice, not a marketing claim.