Sean O'Shea is a UX designer, strategist, researcher, visual designer, front-end developer, and accessibility advocate.

About

Philosophy

Ego has no place in the design process. Fail quickly to succeed quickly. Negative feedback is a gift. Universal and accessible design is ethical design. Designers are toolmakers. Meet people where they are. Be a facilitator. Define the problem. Play. There's always more than one solution. Empathy is the key to resonance. You are not your user.

Motivators

Tackling complex problems. Building consensus and momentum towards a shared vision. Empowering non-designers to provide confident, actionable feedback. Advocating for users. Writing code. Creating comprehensive Figma component systems.

Background

Ten years of experience with two boutique web design firms and a full-service digital advertising agency. Higher-ed, museums and archives, non-profits, research and policy, global health, start-ups. BFA, graphic design.

Hard Skills

Discovery and Research

  • stakeholder workshops
  • design thinking exercises
  • accessibility audits
  • heuristic evaluations
  • analytics audits
  • surveys and focus groups
  • moderated user testing
  • unmoderated user testing
  • card-sorting
  • navigation tree testing

UX Design

  • user flows and journey maps
  • persona development
  • sitemaps and IA
  • content and data modeling
  • modular component systems
  • wireframes and prototyping
  • functional docs

Visual Design

  • spectrum polling
  • moodboards
  • styleguides
  • atomic design
  • figma component systems
  • high-fidelity layouts

Front-end Development

  • accessibility
  • semantic HTML and pug
  • CSS and sass
  • javascript / node
  • gulp and express
  • SVG and canvas

Writing and More

Articles

How to Use Design Thinking to Spark Innovation
Problem-solving, innovation, and brainstorming can be hard. The tricks our brains have evolved to be more efficient can sometimes work against us. We can break those roadblocks using Design Thinking and lateral thinking methods.
Accessible Text Alternatives for Narrative Animations
When animations are a integral part of a site's content, how do you make that content accessible? This article outlines a technique using ARIA roles and JavaScript to provide an equal experience for users that rely on assistive tech.

Speaking

#MW2016: Tackling Complex Web Projects
Session for the Museums and the Web Conference on how museum professionals can plan for and navigate large digital projects.

Figma Plugins

@sposhe/voronoi
Generates Voronoi cell networks as vector shape layers within Figma from a seed frame populated with ellipses marking initial node points.
@sposhe/poisson
Creates an organically random distribution of one or more Figma elements tightly packed to fill a frame based on a Poisson algorithm. Optionally will randomly rotate each instance.
@sposhe/reorder
Reorders a frame's children by their X or Y position (from right to left, top to bottom, etc).

Node Packages

gulp-sass-extend-shorthand
Provides a syntactic sugar shorthand on top of Sass's @extend at-rule syntax, allowing utility classes to be efficiently referenced within more semantic class names.
gulp-url-builder
Explodes a flat directory of files into nested directories based on a simple naming convention.
component-indexer
Automatically scans all files in a directory and then references them from a generated index file for easy bulk inclusion elsewhere. Ideal for Pug and Sass.

Current

Role

Director, UX at Savas Labs

Time Zone

Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5)

Elsewhere

GitHub, Figma, CodePen, StackOverflow, and LinkedIn.

Contact

Send a message about new opportunities or collaborations.