Samuel Smith Email & Phone Number

Cedar Falls, Ia, Us

Moline, Illinois, United States

As a UX Designer on the Fuel Design System team, my team and I work to address alignment and efficiency across John Deere digital products through guidelines, workshops, and design and development tool solutions.

Cedar Falls, Iowa, United States

As a team lead I manage databases of over 150 pieces of digital media production and general use technology, support and manage 10 fellow team members, work with middle management to hire new team members, create training resources, and teach patrons how to use our equipment.I started out working for the Digital Media Hub back in 2019 as a Summer Classroom Support technician where I installed and upgraded equipment in classrooms and meeting spaces across campus. As the 2019 school year began I moved more into the Equipment Services role where I helped patrons reserve, checkout, and learn equipment from our supply which included video and photo cameras, audio equipment, lighting equipment, and other miscellaneous technology including Virtual Reality systems.In Fall of 2021 I was asked to step into the role of Team Lead when middle management decided the current leadership model of hiring Graduate Assistants was no longer working. As the first ever Team Lead for the Digital Media Hub and Technology Support, I perform all tasks of a normal team member as well as taking on managerial duties such as handling our 500+ equipment items in a database called Alma, contacting patrons with late or missing equipment, and working with patrons and team members to ensure they are educated on our equipment and service processes. More information about the Digital Media Hub and Technology Support can be found here: https://it.uni.edu/digital-media-hub

Waterloo, Iowa, United States

As an entry evaluation to receive an opportunity in the Visual Logic internship program, I was tasked with developing a redesign for modern ATM systems. I had never used an ATM before, so my first step in the process was to do research about the current solution. I visited 3 bank ATMs in Cedar Falls, taking notes and pictures of interesting portions of the current design solutions. I then began my strategy work of evaluating the current system against the design heuristics I knew at the time (white space, size of touch points, use of color). After my analysis was complete, I began work on the architecture and design of the new system through sketching, wireframing, component creation, lo-fi, and hi-fi designs. In the end I decided to apply Discover Bank's design standards and create a functional ATM prototype in Adobe XD which you can try out below.During my time at Visual Logic, I completed UX Academy, a comprehensive, 14 week course through all aspects of the User Experience Design process. Lessons included topics such as: the Psychology of UX, Research, Information Architecture (IA), Wireframing, Design Systems, Collaborating with Developers, and Usability Testing. As a Computer Science and Design student, the topics that really piqued my interest were Research, IA, Design Systems, and Usability Testing. We had 1-2 lessons a week and all other time was spent working on client projects with the rest of the team.Interest in these areas and in Web Development manifested itself in my work on the back end of the Visual Logic website, researching different ways to generate static websites, and got me deeper into the world of components, tokens, and design systems as a whole. My final weeks at Visual Logic were spent researching design systems, creating design tokens, and discovering how to best organize components in ways that allow close interaction between designers and developers. This is still my main area of focus in regards to UX.

Cedar Falls, Iowa, United States

I was brought onto the Fortepan Iowa project to create a site design that was more mobile friendly, as everything on the site was developed using hard pixel values with a desktop viewing experience in mind. Initially I thought modifying the existing site would be an option, but as I dug deeper into the code I started to understand how large of a project this website was. Along with this, I was also trying to learn Django, the framework that the site was developed with. After communicating with the project president, I decided it would be simpler to create a layout from scratch using the CSS grid layout a CSS toolset I was beginning to learn and was falling in love with. Before I began writing code, I created a mock-up design in Adobe XD, which you can take a look at a screenshot from below. I used the concept of XD components to create a modular, scalable design that would keep the look and feel of the app consistent with that of the existing site.Before I had a chance to finish my mobile design endeavor, it was decided that my efforts were needed instead on making improvements to the existing desktop site, including adjusting CSS to address bugs, diagnosing other small issues, and working to convert the current Flexbox-based site into Grid for a better viewing experience on mobile, and desktop monitors of varying sizes. My last couple of months with Fortepan Iowa were spent making adjustments to the current site to more closely align it with the initial design specifications for the site. Working on this project exposed me to many new ideas, concepts, and software (Django, segmentation of webpages, JavaScript, and Git). I was contracted for 200 hours of work and completed said contract. The current site for Fortepan Iowa can be found at https://www.fortepan.us (my changes have not yet been pushed to the live site due to backend re-structuring)