James Archer

James Archer is the Chief Creative Officer at Crowd Favorite. He’s a future-focused optimist who loves identifying problems and designing solutions for companies that make a difference.

James Archer is founder of Forty, a creative firm that’s been designing rich, emotional, and effective experiences for over a decade (using primarily WordPress). I’m future-focused optimist who loves identifying problems and designing solutions for companies that make a difference.

Over the years he’s worked for clients like Microsoft, Motorola, Walmart, and Yahoo, and has spoken at many conferences and workshops.

Speaking session

The Human Side of UX Design in the A11y track

Your Presentation

Empathy is the core of design, and an empathy-centered approach to user experience design can create truly transformative results for clients. I’ll show you the results of real projects that followed an empathy-driven design approach, and explain how to make empathy a consistent and repeatable part of everyday projects (even with seemingly oppressive constraints and budgets).

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

  • Why empathy is the thing that separates design from decoration
  • How to implement an empathetic approach in the real world
  • What to do when your client has no budget for user research
  • How to apply empathy in your client relationships
  • How to translate all this touchy-feely stuff into tangible design decisions

Why did you decide to speak?

Because this approach to design has been remarkably successful for us, and I want to others to be able to benefit from it as well.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

We’ve built a metric crap-ton of websites over the past almost 12 years, and after having tried almost every CMS on the market, we kept coming back to WordPress for its simplicity and extensibility.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

I like the “Smart Quotes” plugin, which changes straight quotes to curly/pretty quotes in content. Delicious.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting people who want to create truly great experiences for users.