About Me
My story starts like so many others. I moved to New York City from a small, rural town to pursue acting, arriving in a rental car with all my essential worldly possessions and $2000 in my pocket. I had 2 weeks to find a job and an apartment before the money ran out.
I found an apartment in Queens and a job at an internet start-up that changed everything. What began as a way to pay the bills became a passion for user experience that has shaped my career for over two decades.
UX Solopreneur
On September 10, 2001 (the day before 9/11) I founded Shannon Brown Web Design, LLC, a boutique UX design and development agency. I spent 15 years designing digital experiences for clients ranging from small, independent businesses to recognizable brands like NBCUniversal, Pearson Learning, Bloomberg, Equinox Fitness, AOL, and Edelman.
Running my own business taught me that the most powerful design emerges from deeply listening to what people need, and working to exceed their expectations.
Data & Analytics
In 2014, I pivoted into data and analytics, joining Lancet Data Science (later acquired by Teradata). At Teradata, I worked with Fortune 500 companies including Procter & Gamble, eBay, Prudential, Centene, and Celgene, designing business intelligence dashboards that turned tangled datasets into decisions teams could act on.
Driving UX Strategy at Centene
At Centene, a Fortune 20 company and one of the nation's largest healthcare corporations, I built and lead the Analytics Experience Design (AXD) practice — taking raw, complicated data and turning it into products people can actually use.
My work runs the gamut from driving BI strategy, to designing analytics products that reach 60,000 employees and 21,000+ data consumers, to establishing a design system that scales across hundreds of dashboards. In this role, I have:
Designed an in-house application that replaced a third-party analytics tool, delivering $80M in cost savings.
Deployed an enterprise BI Design System that reduces dashboard development time by 60–75% for 1,800 engineers — later adopted into Centene's enterprise brand assets.
Pioneered an AI-accelerated research and prototyping methodology that speeds UX design time by 4x.
Created a UX Community of Practice and coached team members on UX processes, generating $1.2M in annual cost avoidance by reducing the need for external UX headcount.
Established an enterprise-wide UX customer satisfaction framework proving that UX-integrated products achieve 20+ point higher NPS and 8+ point higher CSAT than non-UX products.
Life Design
Here's what I've learned: the same methods that produce top notch digital products—research, prototyping, and testing—work just as well on the hardest design challenge of all, which is your own life.
That's why I built a coaching program that runs life decisions through the same process UX teams use to solve complex problems. Just as I help organizations design better digital products, I help people reframe where they're stuck, test small experiments, and move forward with a plan instead of a guess.
Whether I'm designing for Fortune 500 companies or helping someone redesign their career, the method is the same: get clear on the real problem, prototype your way toward an answer, and iterate until it works.