Turtl had an unusual start. There was no grand plan, no funding and no prior business experience.

The story began when founders Nick Mason and Mark Sallows were working on an information sharing software project for the Medical Science Division at the University of Oxford. During the project, Nick and Mark got to know a number of post grads and professors in the departments of Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry and became intrigued by research into how the human brain responds to different ways and techniques for presenting information.

The research pointed to the fact that the way in which information is presented to us – use of imagery, choice architectures, level of interaction and so on – has a direct impact on how deeply we engage, how much we are persuaded by what we see and how well we retain the details of what we are shown. The research spanned different methods of presentation including audio, TV news formats, keynote speech formats and more – but
it was the application to written communication formats...