Making agile work more human-centered — Mallory Hartzler Design

Managing growth and performance

Taking a human-centered approach to design means involving the end user from the start, putting them—not just their usage, but the whole of their thinking, emotions, and behaviors—at the center of the design process. As design lead in a newly agile environment, I led the team’s efforts to advocate for the humans who used our digital products every day, ensuring the product team kept the bigger picture of the end user’s broader needs at the center of their work.

Primary role: UX and Accessibility Lead

Time frame: February 2021 – November 2023

Developed the “Build & Serve” business model

While the business made great strides in software development, it risked leaving behind the end users and UX, with business models changing rapidly and limited foundation for effective design, development, and production of digital products. I championed and helped the consumer digital team navigate the challenges and communication gaps of being the first team to adopt an agile working system while other teams and stakeholders still operated on waterfall. I took on additional UX leadership responsibility by pointing out assumptions being made about user behavior, explaining UX processes and principles to the product team, involving developers and product owners in the design process to build empathy for users, and fighting for timelines that included user research to validate hypotheses.

Martin, Design Director, KeyBank

“Mallory pushed for design to take more of a proactive, strategic role [in Consumer Digital], shifting a from production-based reactionary posture. While this took time and required them to first establish their own credibility, Mallory pivoted the relationship over months to where it is today.”

Created a UX Challenge

With limited structure for building design into the product roadmap, I built a relationship with senior leadership on the consumer digital team to help us collaboratively determine viability of potential designs, so that we weren’t allocating finite design resources on projects and products without bringing end users into the design process. I created a scenario-based challenge to develop a North Star for mobile native design based on existing user challenge data, in order to visualize and validate multi-million-dollar app changes. This allowed us to time-box our limited design resources while also elevating design thinking for existing and future app needs.

Evan, Senior Product Designer, KeyBank

“[The UX Challenge] was a great opportunity to think with no constraints and design for advanced technologies.”

Instituted Accessibility Expert office hours

Understanding how design teams and processes work, I created “expert” office hours on a regular basis to allow designers across the entire design studio to ask questions and get feedback around accessibility in their designs. This allowed the team to build accessibility for everyone into their designs earlier and more easily, expanding the team’s knowledge and skill sets and helping to make our products more inclusive.

Bre, Senior Product Designer, KeyBank

“Mallory is always challenging and reminding me to make accessibility one of the first boxes I check instead of one of the last.”

Recapturing the magic of on-demand home servicing