Thesis
Digital products moved from novelty to infrastructure. The design
choices inside them — how consent is obtained, how attention is
captured, how AI behaves under stress, how a user gets out — now
produce measurable harm at scale, and that harm is increasingly the
subject of enforcement.
Other industries solved versions of this through standards bodies.
Not consultancies. Not software vendors. Standards bodies:
independent, versioned, governed in public, funded without conflict.
EII applies that model to digital experience safety.
We are deliberately modest in scope. EII does not regulate. It
measures, documents, certifies, and publishes. Regulators, procurement
teams, insurers, and platforms use the measurement. The standard works
if it is trustworthy; trustworthiness is a function of governance,
not the logo.
Co-founders
Melissa Geurts
Co-founder · Design & Research
Melissa Geurts is Group Executive Creative Director at
Good Housekeeping (Hearst), where she leads
creative strategy across digital, social, video, and print.
Good Housekeeping and its research arm, the
Good Housekeeping Institute — an American
pioneer in consumer product testing and safety evaluation since
1900 — provide the institutional foundation for EII's approach:
independent standards, transparent methodology, and public
accountability. Melissa has spent eleven years at Good
Housekeeping translating complex systems — regulatory, technical,
scientific — for mainstream audiences, including directing
covers and campaigns with Susan Sarandon, Kathryn Hahn, and
Hoda Kotb, and judging the National Magazine Awards.
She is the founder of The Blue Algorithm LLC,
the studio behind EII, which publishes independently at the
intersection of emotional UX, ethical technology, and the gap
between knowing and doing. Her work on consumer AI has included
collaboration with Anthropic's communications team and speaking
engagements at the 2025 AWS Media & Entertainment Summit alongside
NBCUniversal, Warner Bros Discovery, and AMC Networks. As a
recording artist, her debut year drew over
1 million streams across 150 countries, with
press describing her work as a "glitch-pop exorcism."
At EII she leads design of the standard, the Incident Log, the
Pattern Library, and the methodology by which emotional safety
is measured and communicated.
Joshua Hobson
Co-founder · Governance & Operations
Joshua Hobson leads the governance side of EII — conflict-of-interest
policy, review operations, the revocation process, and the
funding model that keeps the body independent. He holds a
BA in Sociology from the United Kingdom and
spent the early part of his career in
regulatory compliance in the UK, where the
discipline of documenting systems against external standards
became his working framework. He now operates an
ethical butchery practice in New York centered
on full-animal utilization, traceable sourcing, and transparent
supply chains — the same commitments, applied to a different
domain.
The combination is deliberate. A standards body's credibility
is not in its marketing; it is in the boring infrastructure
that keeps reviewers independent, evidence documented, and
policies honored when commercial pressure arrives. That is the
work.
At EII he owns the structures that make the standard
enforceable: reviewer panels, evidence requirements, the
appeals track, the annual transparency report, and the
relationships with procurement and insurance partners that
will use EII certification as a requirement rather than a
preference.
Why us
An honest question. Two people starting a standards body is a choice
the reader is entitled to question. Our answer is structural, not
credentialed:
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Design authority combined with governance discipline.
Melissa has spent eleven years at Good Housekeeping — an American
pioneer in independent consumer product testing — doing the work
of translating complex technical standards into consumer-legible
language. Joshua spent the early part of his career in UK
regulatory compliance and now runs a practice built on
traceability and transparent sourcing. A standards body is made
of exactly those two disciplines: how to measure, and how to be
measured honestly against external standards.
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No competing commercial incentive. Neither of us
is selling a compliance product. EII does not consult for the
products it reviews. The Blue Algorithm LLC makes its living on
other work (editorial, music, Stillware). EII is funded by
certification review fees and nothing else.
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Willingness to publish our own accountability.
The Governance page contains a self-audit of EII against its own
standard. If we fail it, we say so. Stillware — co-founded by
Melissa — is the first Charter Cohort applicant and will be
reviewed by financially-disinterested reviewers. Melissa is
recused from that review.
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A standards body does not require permission to exist.
UL started as one engineer. The Good Housekeeping Institute
started in 1900. Consumer Reports started in 1936. Standards
bodies are founded; they earn credibility through governance,
publication, and time. EII is at the beginning of that process,
and everything about this site is designed to be evaluated on
those grounds.
How EII is organized
EII operates as a non-commercial standards body. The standard,
Incident Log, Pattern Library, Regulatory Map, self-assessment, risk
calculator, and RFP language are free and publicly accessible.
Certification is a paid independent review process; fees fund the
review infrastructure and governance, and are disclosed in the annual
report.
Conflict-of-interest, complaints, appeals, and revocation policies
are published on the Governance page.
EII does not consult for the products it reviews. Reviewers cannot
hold financial interests in products under their review.
Contact
For press, partnerships, applications, corrections, or general
inquiry: contact. Comment on the v0.9
standard: open through 30 June 2026.