My name is Shawn Smith. I currently live in San Francisco and work as an independent User Experience consultant.
Most recently, I was part of the founding team for a startup called Scout Labs (where I still blog fairly regularly). I’ve worked in the field of User Experience for more than a decade now, and my professional mission has been to craft digital experiences that delight customers, improve people’s lives and deliver measurable results. I’ve helped do this for some of the biggest companies in the world, and a bunch of smaller more adventurous ones too.
If that’s not enough about me, then you can find more on Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp and Flickr among other places, or read on…
I originally wrote the post below for my 20-year high school reunion, under the title “My Real Resume” to chronicle the winding road I’ve taken between then and now…
Farmer
For several months during the summer of 1990, I worked on a dairy farm in Switzerland, where I developed the manure-slinging skills I will need if civilization collapses
Ceramics Teacher
In college I used to go to a local craft center once in a while to throw clay. One day I mentioned to a staffer there that my dad was a ceramics teacher. She asked me whether I was interested in teaching ceramics. I thought she meant someday, as a career, but she meant the following week. And that’s how I accidentally became my dad for a year.
Freelance Photographer
Officially my first job after college. My roommate in New York worked for an architecture firm and managed to pass me off to her employer as someone qualified to take photos of their work.
Book Store Clerk – New York, Tempe, Phoenix, Tucson, Philadelphia
For a string of stores. Not much to say about the starving artist phase of my life except that it’s the closest I’ve come to using my English degree toward my career.
Playwright and Actor
The “artist” part of the starving artist phase: I wrote a bunch of plays and acted in a bunch more for a small black-box troupe called The Unlikely Theater Company in Arizona.
Actor and Crew
I moved to Tucson and helped a friend there make a movie called Dog Years. You can rent it from Netflix or buy it on Amazon, but don’t let that fool you into believing it’s watchable. Fun fact: I’m Shawn Smith VII in the IMDB.
User Experience Consultant – Philly, SF, Düsseldorf, Singapore…
Someone invented the Internet, and it created a whole bunch of new jobs, so with no qualifications whatsoever I was hired in 1997 as employee #6 by a web services company called Digital Wave. Well, it turned out the Internet wasn’t a fad and in 1999, I decided to move to the Bay Area. I still don’t really know how to explain what I do in less than a paragraph, but if your bank’s website is hard to use, or if you get irritated trying to navigate your mobile phone, it might be my fault. For one stretch of a little less than a year, I was lucky to spend a lot of time working in Europe – designing useful (I hope) applications for mobile phones. A couple years later, I got to spend about a year in Southeast Asia working on some web applications for Singapore Airlines. During my time in Asia, and through a series of events you can read about elsewhere on this blog, I was named one of Singapore’s “50 Most Eligible Bachelors” by a women’s magazine called CLEO.
Co-Founder, Experience Architect
And now? A friend of mine secured some funding from Halsey Minor last fall and asked me to help her start up a web/software company along with another friend and former colleague of ours. We’re called Scout Labs, and we’re building software to help companies follow conversations in blogs and other social media, and measure the impact of those conversations on their business or industry.
