James Archer

Product Marketing

The 50 most popular brand colors

A quantitative analysis of the 1,239 brand colors used by 456 notable brands

Product Design

Product design as haiku

Those constraints you think are holding your product back may actually be what sets it free to succeed.

Product Leadership

Managing expectations like a pro

How you manage stakeholder expectations can make them love or hate you—regardless of project outcomes.

Product Design

The hamburger menu doesn’t work

The hamburger menu is a beautiful, elegant solution that gets it all wrong, and it’s time to move on.

Product Design

This is why user research scares people

There are three main reasons why companies resist user research, and how you can address them

Product Marketing

The experience is the product

Much marketing fails because it focuses on mere features and benefits instead of the higher needs of customers

Product Design

Why is mobile-first design failing?

"Mobile-first" design is a tempting solution to the complexity of supporting multiple devices, but it creates significant problems for users.

Product Design

Powerful designer / developer collaboration

Designers and developers are a heavenly match...if they can learn not to drive each other crazy

Product Design

Introducing the Persuasive Design Model (video)

The Persuasive Design Model is a framework for steering how users perceive and interact with your product or company.

Product Design

Design like an astronaut

Managing your emotional state is fundamental to great design

Product Design

How cognitive bias skews design reviews

Knowing when you’re tricking yourself helps you make better design decisions (This article was co-authored with Jessica Schultz) Being human means we’re not always logical. Our brains have developed certain ways of thinking that help us understand and simplify the complex world around us in simple ways, but

Product Design

Software design mistakes that just won’t die

Good design is good business As the Chief Creative Officer here at Crowd Favorite, I spend pretty much all day obsessing about how to improve user experiences. I've observed a number of recurring software design problems over the years, and I thought I'd share a handful of them here for

Product Marketing

Getting past "pretty"

You can’t solve your problems with a fresh coat of paint Let’s say a company comes to our firm interested in hiring us. We’ll call them SynergyCo. They make about $100 million/year in revenue selling a niche software product. They’ve had their market cornered in

Product Design

Business software doesn’t have to hurt

I’ve worked on a lot of enterprise software projects over the years, and one of the common patterns I’ve observed is a surprisingly high tolerance for poor user experience. If you’ve ever worked in a cubicle farm, you’re probably all too familiar with the baffling HR

Product Design

What I look for in designers

I'm often asked what I look for when hiring designers. It boils down to just one thing.

Product Design

The human side of UX design (video)

In this talk, James Archer discusses the emotional side of design, and how empathy applies not just to users but to clients as well. YouTube Transcript (auto-generated): okay I want to start by telling a story about remote controls so I went on amazon and i tried to find the

Product Design

Creative freedom isn't what you think it is (video)

In this talk, James Archer explains how creative freedom isn't what most people think it is. YouTube captions transcript (auto-generated): the theme for this month is freedom and I want to tell you a little story this is edward steichen who's one of the most influential photographers in history and

Product Marketing

Being best beats being first

Sometimes being "first to market" means you're doing all the hard work for someone else. Maybe it's time to slow down and reconsider The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout is undeniably a classic text and should be read by anyone in this industry. However,

Product Marketing

What dystopian science fiction taught me about designing great customer experiences

Fictional views of a dehumanized future reveal a lot of insights into the frustrations your customers are experiencing every day One of the most common themes in popular science fiction is the feeling of technology and/or corporations squeezing the humanity out of the human race. It's easy to find

Product Leadership

20 words you can drop from your core values right now

Trying to convince customers you have the best quality, integrity, or customer service may be a losing battle. Here's an alternative to consider As part of our branding practice at Forty, we often work with clients to identify (or overhaul) their company's core values. The biggest problem we see is

Product Marketing

How the "Friend or Foe?" response helps you understand your customers

To understand what's going on in your customers' heads, sometimes you have to get back to basic human psychology Let's skip all the high-concept marketing talk, and get back to basics for a few minutes here. Branding and marketing isn't about fluff, or trickery, or opinions, or manipulation, or creativity,

Product Marketing

A simple trick to beef up your company's logo

It's tempting to jam your corporate identity full of bells and whistles, but the strongest identities are still the simplest ones When designing a logo, it's easy to go overboard. There are so many great elements you can work with (colors, textures, patterns, shapes, borders, typography, gradients, icons, etc.) that

Product Marketing

Top 10 tips for corporate naming

Every company or product needs a name, but few business owners ever really learn how to create effective names. Here are some tips to get you started. A clever, memorable name can make a potential client think about the company for a few extra moments, which may be all you

Product Design

Agile design: what we've learned

What Agile is all about, why it’s so dang hard to implement, and why it works beautifully for design The birth of Agile In February of 2001, seventeen software developers with an interest in lightweight development methods gathered at a resort in the Rocky Mountains in Utah. As they

Product Marketing

Deep design: getting beyond decoration (video)

In this session from the Method+Madness conference, James Archer talks about how to get past the designer-as-decorator, "make it pretty" mentality, and how to sell a design process based around depth, substance, and real-world problem solving. YouTube Transcript (auto-generated): all right I want to start by telling you a