Director of User Experience

Strategy, Research, and Design + Empathy Driven Culture Builder

Based in Atlanta, Georgia • Raised in Southern California • Global Worker

Updated: March 18, 2025

sheltonjdavis[at]gmail.com

LinkedIn

SheltonDavis.com

EmpathyLab.io

Key Expertise

• Team leader focused on safe, empathetic, and collaborative work environments

• Ethnographic design research facilitation, documentation, and strategy development

• Human centered accessibility and usability driven design practice

• Rapid prototyping from sketches and wireframes to basic front end development and manufactured products

• Facilitator, speaker, and lecturer on empathy driven design practices

• Complex experience and systems mapping for innovative opportunity

• Self-care advocate

• Mentor for UX, UI, and industrial designers

Summary

I focus on listening and asking questions in order to gain insights, collaborate, build culture, and innovate the best and most accessible design experiences possible. This focus is the bi-product of over 15 years of practice and learning as an industrial designer and user experiences design professional.

I have pioneered, lead, managed, and built UX design practices for startups, companies, and clients. I have also been a trusted member of UX teams as the champion of user research, accessibility compliance, design systems, informed decision making, rapid prototyping, and innovation strategy. Throughout all of these experiences, my successes have lead to many lucrative product launches, positive company innovations/acquisitions, and most importantly to me; healthy individual relationships and team growth. I have also learned a lot from missteps, failures, frayed emotions, and company closures. These learnings together continue to make me deeply appreciative of how important it is to design experiences with honesty and integrity for as many people as possible.

Tools and Skills

• Research informed custom ChatGPT Creation

• Figma, Sketch, Adobe, Axure, Balsamiq, Marvel, Proto.io, Invision

• Hand sketching, rapid paper prototyping, live diagramming

• Systems design practices

• 18f guides, 508 references, and numerous human centered design websites

• System design coordination and implementation

• Ethnographic research facilitation, support, analysis, and documentation

• Quantitative survey research analysis

• Basic front end development (HTML5, CSS, Javascript, + ChatGPT help)

• Group research facilitation

• Full UX deliverables (wireframes, journey maps, personas, design language guides, etc.)

Latest Readings

• These Truths
• The Art of Happiness
• The Empathy Diaries
• Connect
• Ruined by Design
• Narnia Series (with my kiddos)
• Aware
• Parable of the Sower

Volunteer

• Avondale Association of Racial Justice
• Center for Compassionate Leadership
• OpenHand, Atlanta
• IDSA Juror 2021-2022

WORK

Empathy Lab, Inc. | Founder, CEO, Facilitator, Trainer, UX R&D Director

Jan 2016 - present

Atlanta, Georgia

Hybrid

Team and individual training to cultivate trusted empowered people and cultures

• Created the Empathy Decathlon® workshop framework to make emotional intelligence skills more accessible and approachable as a business strategy with the goal of improving individual self-confidence, intra-team collaboration + trust, onboarding, and product innovation cycles
• Co-trained six Empathy Decathlon facilitators to coach and run Empathy Decathlon practices and workshops, with two coaches and curriculum in Spanish
• Facilitated over 500 workshops with individuals and teams from 2 to 100 people worldwide and measurably improved common languages, practices, and connection within teams
  • Worked with teams/companies focused on software, hardware, banking, developer tooling, rehab, PR, and refereeing basketball in Spanish
  • Worked with teams from Atlanta, Boston, Denver, and San Francisco to Bangkok and Berlin
• Guest lecturer at Morehouse College, Georgia Tech, Emory University, and the University of Kentucky with a focus on Empathy in Design Thinking to help students connect self empathy practices to successful business strategy

Genuine Parts Company (NAPA Autoparts) | E-Commerce UX Team Lead

May 2024 - Jan 2025

Atlanta, Georgia

Hybrid

Lead UX Designer driving e-commerce platform optimization, user satisfaction, and cross-functional collaboration.

• Led UX design for all e-commerce platforms, including NAPA Online (B2C), Parts Pro, and PROLink (B2B).
• Built and optimized design processes to enhance collaboration with product, business, and development partners across multiple time zones (India, Poland, West + East USA).
• Established structured processes, including backlog management, work processes, demo and critique schedules, and growth opportunities for the design team.
• Supervised a team of UX designers and collaborated with the lead UX researcher and their team.
• Utilized Figma and worked with the design systems team to refine and clean up e-commerce offerings.
• Focused on goals such as increasing user ability to find and add parts to a cart, reducing cart abandonment, enhancing search capabilities along with backend technology improvement, and providing the necessary product information per part to expedite vehicle repair jobs.
• Conducted A/B tests and monitored metrics through FullStory and Adobe Analytics.
• Enhanced cross-functional collaboration, overcoming challenges related to distributed teams and fostering a culture of innovation.

Nationwide Insurance | Innovation Consultant + Lead UX Researcher + Designer

Terminus Software, Inc. | Director of Product User Experience