A photo of Shannon E. Thomas

Hello! I'm Shannon, and I contain multitudes.

Let’s start with the basics. I'm a creative leader obsessed with user-centered design and product strategy. Most recently, I headed up the Experience Design team at VanMoof. Now I’m spending my days working at Atelier Awful, either painting or making faces out of clay. I also wrote The Practical Guide to Experience Design.

A Few Highlights

Coming to Our Senses

a woman sits in the window and smells her wrist
a woman stands in the window and listens to birdsongs playing from her iPhone
a woman stands in the window, drinking lemon flavor from a can
a woman surrounded by photos of friends and family presses her hand against the window because she is alone

Women wait in their windows, looking out on nothing. Each tries desperately to recreate a specific sensation, something that once was, but now that has vanished in all but a synthesized form.

2022
Acrylic on Panel

Pages from The Practical Guide to Experience Design

The Practical Guide to Experience Design

After five years of running a boutique UX consultancy, I gathered our many learnings into a practical guidebook of processes, complete with high-fidelity examples.

Future Perfect

Botticelli's Primavera with face recognition overlays
Breugel's The Tower of Babel floating on a gigantic pontoon
Raphael's Saint Catherine of Alexandria with a face blurred beyond recognition

In the past we had gods; now we have technology. Future Perfect combines renaissance stories and compositions with contemporary themes and technology.

2019
Acrylic on Canvas

a rendering of a well-designed city bike

I'm obsessed with connected products, especially bikes.

I spent the past three years establishing a team, a practice, and an experience strategy within e-bike startup VanMoof.

Here are some other things to click on:

a clay vessel with a face whose eyebrow is raised
an illustration of a camera
a pink mask with popcorn painted on it
a woman holds a lotus flower
a woman looks at the camera
a sketch of a woman wearing a mask
a labyrinth in the shape of the letter A
a charcoal illustration of a woman