Hiya! I'm Sean A. Smith
I'm a product manager on USA TODAY's content capabilities team where I coordinate design and dev efforts around our elections results, news automation and natural language generation platforms.
I geek out on information hierarchy, APIs, workflow diagrams and prototyping, and love a geometric sans-serif.
Priors include working as a developer on Gannett's content innovation team, and studying and teaching in Texas State University's Digital Media Innovation program where I graduated as top master's student in May 2019.
USA TODAY Elections
Role: Product manager
Tools: Jira, Confluence, usability testing
Texas Primaries
Architect Longform
Role: Product owner, UX/UI research and design, theme development, block development
Tools: WordPress, Gutenberg/React, Sketch, PHP, HTML, CSS, jQuery
Read More
Content Diversity Dashboard
Role: UX/UI research and design
Tools: Adobe Xd, Miro, prototyping
An old press release, but more soon
USA TODAY Sports "Couchketball" AR
Role: Front-end developer
Tools: 8th Wall, HTML, CSS, Javascript
View archived footage
Architect Photo Essay
Role: WordPress developer
Tools: PHP (WordPress plugin development), CSS, JS
Columbus Dispatch used it!
Bytecast early prototyping
Role: UX/UI design, design and dev management
Tools: Adobe Sketch
Read more
Updater: Experimental Database Journalism
Role: Developer
Tools: Ajax, jQuery, CSS, Google Sheets API
Example here from the Statesman
Apollo 11: Nationally syndicated feature series
Role: Theme/layout designer and WordPress developer
Tools: PHP, CSS, jQuery, news layout design
Oklahoman's coverage
Redefining Doctoral Education
Role: Research assistant/coauthor
Tools: Research writing, literature review
Read the paper here