Interview
The Gist
- Personal passion project. Shelby Mitchell integrates her personal insights and professional expertise to pioneer digital accessibility at Discover.
- Accessibility is a team effort. A dedicated team collaborates extensively across multiple departments to ensure that accessibility is woven into every digital initiative.
- Accessibility support from the top down. Leadership at Discover actively supports and promotes a culture that prioritizes accessibility, recognizing its importance in serving a diverse customer base.
Shelby Mitchell of Discover brings a unique perspective to her role, driven by personal experiences and a passion for making digital spaces universally accessible.
In this detailed discussion, part of our CMSWire TV video series, "The Digital Experience," she reveals how her personal challenges have shaped her professional path, leading to significant advancements in accessibility at Discover. This conversation sheds light on the intersection of personal dedication and corporate responsibility in creating inclusive digital environments.
Table of Contents
- Harnessing Personal Experience to Drive Innovation in Accessibility at Discover (1:30)
- Building an Inclusive Digital Future: The Dynamics of Discover's Accessibility Team (7:10)
- Cultivating a Culture of Accessibility at Discover (16:17)
- The Role of AI in Digital Accessibility (19:47)
- The KPIs of Digital Accessibility (22:48)
- Pioneering Accessibility: The Evolution of Discover’s Digital Inclusion Efforts (25:15)
Episode Transcript
Dom Nicastro: All right, we're here today with Shelby Mitchell, Senior Manager of Digital Accessibility at Discover. Shelby, how's it going?
Shelby Mitchell: It's great. I'm so excited to be talking to you, Dom.
Dom: Yeah, you too. I mean, we connected before and had a great talk about digital accessibility. It's what you live and breathe at Discover, and I'm like, "Let's get her on just to tell the whole world about it." Because to me, it's like, how can you even start building a digital experience without considering this, right, from the jump? It's everything to me, right?
Shelby Mitchell: Absolutely. I definitely view digital accessibility as the foundation to enabling exceptional customer experiences. The fact is, you know, one in four, or a little over 25% of the adult US population has a disability. And, you know, we're all temporarily abled. So at some point, we will acquire a disability in our life, whether it be temporary, situational, or permanent. For businesses to continue servicing the customers they have and to attract new customers, we need to make sure we're taking into account their changing wants, needs, and abilities as we maintain that relationship with the customer.
Harnessing Personal Experience to Drive Innovation in Accessibility at Discover
Dom: Yeah, well said. And let's even go backwards for a second. This is a real big passion project for you; you're really into this for many reasons. So let's tell our listeners how you evolved into this role where you're totally focused on this very important part of the digital experience. Give us a little background on how you got to Discover.
Shelby Mitchell: Sure, yeah. I mean, I've been at Discover for a little over 10 years. I started out in the email marketing team, running email campaigns. I worked in advertising agencies prior to my time at Discover. I also worked at a retail company before Discover. I just started transitioning more toward project management and marketing technology platforms. When COVID hit, I was like, "Okay, what's the next thing? How can I continue to grow and evolve?" And I really started to think about what was personally important to me. I have a child with disabilities. He's seven years old; he had a stroke in utero, so he has cerebral palsy, epilepsy, as well as something called apraxia of speech. We're still very early in his journey with disabilities, and I wanted to figure out a way to merge my customer experience and marketing experience with what is part of my personal life. So I started getting into universal design, inclusive design, and digital accessibility. During COVID, when we weren't driving around, when we were all in lockdown, that's really where I started digging in deep.
Shelby: And ultimately, put together a proposal for having it as a unique function within Discover. And it became its own function. Now we have a small team. So it's really exciting to see how things have grown and evolved and the excitement within Discover around the work that we're doing.
Dom: It's amazing how you took that personal story and really applied it to your passion for work at Discover. And I can imagine there are some things that parents take for granted, like, "Hey, just throw the iPad in his hands, or give them this phone and just let them press some buttons." And that doesn't happen for everyone that easily. So I'm sure there were moments for you with your child where you said, "Wow, this is a seminal moment for me. They can't do this. I'm going to fix this here, and I'm going to fix it at work."
Shelby Mitchell: Yes, my son, we say he's pre-verbal; he could still develop speech, like what you and I are doing right now. But in the meantime, he leverages a communication device. It's essentially like there are pictures and words on that communication device, and he's tapping on those to put together short phrases and sentences. So, in thinking about that, I often think about, okay, when he's old enough to open a credit card or a checking account, what will that digital experience look like for him? Will he be able to engage with a website or a mobile app with the way it's currently designed? If he needs customer support, will he be able to communicate what he needs or where he's struggling? And will the agents be able to communicate back? Now, call centers are a bit broader than what we're focused on right now; we're really focused at Discover on getting solid with our website and our mobile app from an accessibility perspective. There are other teams also doing a lot of work—our consumer insights team and our call centers, our technology teams. Everybody's doing a lot of work, but my team is really focused on the web and mobile experience right now.
And then you always have to start somewhere. I think that's—we'll do a slight segue. You know, it's really easy when you get into digital accessibility, or just accessibility in general. It can get very big, very fast. And if you don't take a step back and say, "Okay, what are the few things that I can do today to make a difference?"
You'll easily become overwhelmed. So that's, you know, we've spent a lot of time over the past few years, like, "Okay, what are we really going to hone in on? And where are we going to start knowing that there's a lot of great work being done in other areas of Discover, too."
But what is our team going to focus on?
Related Article: 4 Principles for Accessible Web Design & Digital Experiences
Building an Inclusive Digital Future: Dynamics of Discover's Accessibility Team
Dom: Yeah, yeah. Tell me more about that team too, you know, like the team that is trying to weave in and build accessible digital experiences for the website and mobile app. Like, how does that look structurally? Team-wise? How do you collaborate? You must have developers involved, designers, marketers who just want to roll out everything possible, and then they come in, and Shelby's like, "Alright, let's take a step back. We need to design this a little bit more differently here." So how does that whole basic dynamic work?
Shelby Mitchell: Yeah, so our team, we are a mighty team of two. And we are really, I would say, the subject matter experts in digital accessibility. So we work and consult with our development teams, our design teams, our design system, and common component teams. Because, you know, really, digital accessibility is something that you—it's a multi-touchpoint approach. If you don't have an accessible design, then the developers can't create an accessible experience.
So it really does start with design, it starts with research too when we're starting to come up with concepts for a digital experience, whether it's for our website, our mobile app, or both. It's ensuring that we are pulling in individuals with various disabilities to understand what works well, what's not working well.
And then adjust the design and the development appropriately, depending on when the research is being done. But research is also a very big, big piece as well. And we also have, as sort of a gut check, our Universal Design Advisory Board at Discover, which is employees with disabilities, as well as parents and family members and friends of individuals with disabilities. And the purpose of that board is to provide a gut check to tech teams that maybe don't have something ready to do like more fleshed-out usability testing or consumer insights testing.
So they'll bring it to the Advisory Board, and the advisory board will leverage their personal experiences, their lived experience, and say, "This is what works well, and what doesn't work well. Or you may want to think about adjusting the colors, the amount of content that's present because depending on somebody's neurodiverse having a very content-heavy page may be too much to consume."
So again the advisory board started out of recruiting people from our employee resource groups. And, you know, we've—our projects have grown over the years. We started with just a couple of projects the first year, we had 10 the next year, 15, we've already had four this year, which is pretty awesome.
Dom: So, yeah, and I—you know, it's more people hear about the group, they bring things to the group as well. That is powerful, how you have actual in-house employees, as an advisory board, and then external people that just looking at what you're creating and doing like that gut check. I love that term. As you said, Can you recall a specific one where you were like, "Wow, we didn't think about that," where someone was looking at a particular design in the digital world? You're like, "Man, that's true. Why do we have to do that?"
Shelby Mitchell: Yeah, so there was a project, actually, it started with our physical product. And it's since evolved into looking at how we address it in the digital space. But we were doing research on what was the best physical product for users with vision disabilities. And, you know, we were working with consumer insights and actually multiple card teams. And one of the things that came out of that research, we had a hypothesis of what we thought was going to work, we shared it with these different products with the users. And they're like, "This doesn't work for me, like, here's what would actually work for me."
So, because we did this research at the very beginning, one, we learned a lot in saying, "Okay, again, this is a perfect case study of why you have to ask people with disabilities what works and what doesn't, because your assumptions could be totally wrong." And our assumptions were totally wrong.
But then it also evolved the conversation to say, "Okay, well, you know, there was a lot of great feedback out of this research. How can we leverage some of our existing products already?"
And help categorize them in a different way so that somebody who's looking for something very specific can find it? And then, you know, have it sent to them? So, and then, you know, yeah, it's—it's expanded into how do we convey that in the digital space so they can get the product that they want? And that they need? That works best for them? Yeah. In what stage is that at the moment was that like, rolled out based on the feedback as it finished, kind of nothing's ever finished in the digital world, but it's always a work in progress. But that was that like—
Shelby Mitchell: So it is still in progress. The digital aspect of it is still being worked on. And you know, I can—I can get you a launch date, once we get closer. But yeah, it's—it's been really exciting to see that work. And it's, again, it's—it's sparked other conversations of, "Okay, we're touching this experience. What about, you know, what about this experience that feeds into the one that we're working on?"
Dom: Yeah, and not to mention with, you know, hovering over your team as you work is the law. Right? Because you have to comply with what is it ADA? And a lot of things, right, namely the American With Disabilities Act, correct?
Shelby Mitchell: Yeah, we actually work very closely with our ADA coverage attorney, and we have an ADA compliance subject matter expert. And really, when I was getting started in this work, I was working very closely with them just to understand more about the Americans with Disabilities Act, but kind of understanding like where it stops and where broader accessibility and equity starts, I think is really important. Because, you know, the law says that we have to have a reasonable accommodation.
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Shelby Mitchell: But what I tell people over and over again is an accommodation isn't necessarily a good customer experience. And that accommodation may not always work for everybody. So we have to start again, we have to kind of take a step back and look, take a broader view of what works, what doesn't work, pull in customers and users who have those lived experiences to really understand what, you know, what does work, what would be an exceptional customer experience for you. And oftentimes, it's just like, "I need it to work, you know, to work with my technology, I need it to work with, you know, magnification, or, you know, maybe chat works better for me than calling into a call center." So understanding what works for so many different individuals and thinking about that as we put solutions together.
Cultivating a Culture of Accessibility at Discover
Dom: Yeah, and certainly, no one's gonna question your passion for this ever. I mean, like, like we said earlier, living and breathing it in your personal life and your work life. How do you get a lot of teams on board with this? And like, no one in your company is going to say, "I don't care about accessibility," of course, but there has to be that culture that you build around it, and baking accessibility into every single digital experience, and just having the conversation and, and talking about challenges and having difficult conversations, frankly. So, you know, speak to that about, you know, how Discover's leadership has gotten involved and empowered your teams to do its thing, and sort of how you go about creating that culture in the company.
Shelby Mitchell: Yeah, so I think, you know, to start with, Discover has a culture of putting the customer first, enabling our customers to have a brighter financial future, so our culture is already in the right place, I think. Just broadening that view and saying accessibility is a part of that, you know, it just ties in very well with what our culture already is, and what it stands for. So I think that helps. Culture is like a huge part of being able to have gains in the accessibility space.
And I would say, you know, we've had meetings with our executive team to share the work that we're doing, and they're very supportive. I think even, you know, a lot of leaders within our organization too are supportive because of the culture, that's what attracted them to come to Discover.
Shelby Mitchell: But you know, there's always, when you don't have a personal connection to disability, sometimes it can be a little bit challenging to understand. It essentially, you know, how big the population is, how many people, and what types of disabilities there are. I even expand out to, we also have to think about our customers who are aging; they may not identify as someone with a disability, but some of the feedback that we receive from them is very similar to someone who is hard of hearing, or who is blind, or who has mobility limitations. So, you know, we have to think a little bit more broadly than we may have in the past, and I think bringing in stories, from individuals with disabilities, sharing—I share my story and my connection pretty frequently.
Shelby Mitchell: But then also just sharing that, you know, it's roughly 27% of the adult US population, and there's tremendous buying power in this population, too. It's $490 billion. And then if you expand it out to household, it's in the trillions of dollars. So, you know, it's a much larger group than I think people initially realize. So I think just how, you know, bringing the statistics, the numbers out is helpful. And also understanding that an accessible experience again, is going to be able to flex with an individual over time as we build that really strong customer relationship.
The Role of AI in Digital Accessibility
Dom: Yeah. One thing in the digital experience role that's happened. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's this AI thing happening right now. It certainly changed the game for me a bit in editorial, you know, helped me with processing interviews, condensing things that are long. So is there any significant implementation of generative AI that has helped digital accessibility? Or is it in the experimental phase at the moment?
Shelby Mitchell: You know, I would say it's still very much a mixed bag. Because AI is only as good as the person putting the information in. And a lot of time, when it comes to numbers being put in, or, you know, like there's image generation AI now too—it's like, you can say, "Oh, I want a person with this disability, you know, on a beach or something."
Shelby Mitchell: It can almost perpetuate a stereotype. So, but then there's other AI that helps with being able to write documents, to complete forms. So, there, I would say, you know, it's still pretty early to tell, it is a mixed bag, I think, you know, there's a lot of large technology companies who have a big focus on accessibility. And so, you know, I think the source of information, we're going to start to see some really good AI technologies out there that take into account and really include people with disabilities, but it's still, I would say, it's still very much a mixed bag.
And, you know, I always tell people, when it comes to anything accessibility-related, always do research to see what the people who have a disability feel about it. Because a lot of times, you know, there's technology out there that on the surface, as someone who doesn't have a particular disability, I might think, "Oh, this is great." But then you start to reach out to the community, you start to see what the community is saying about it, and it's like, "Oh, I don't want to be anywhere near that technology." So yeah, it's always like, always question again, like, you know, who was it created for? Was that individual or that group of individuals included in the design and development?
Shelby Mitchell: And is it really solving a need? Or is it something that is a perceived need that's just really not there?
The KPIs of Digital Accessibility
Dom: Yeah. What kind of KPIs are you looking at in your world? Like, what kind of metrics and measurement because one thing I know about marketers and customer experience/digital experience folks, they always want to test how they've done. They roll out a campaign, how many people open the email? How many people went to the website, right? From the email, we're always doing that ourselves in editorial. It's exhausting, but fun. You get to shift on the fly, right?
In the digital accessibility world, what are the metrics to say, "Hey, how are we doing?" And I gotta think one of them is the anecdotal feedback from the people that are using the, like, giving you their insights. I mean, that's got to be number one. Right?
Shelby Mitchell: Yeah, so feedback is definitely probably the most important thing. But then, you know, people want to see some of those hard numbers. And I would say, it's looking more at, you know, if there are, you know, with a website or with our mobile app, are we seeing changes in the people leaving our digital presence and calling our call centers? What is that rate? Are we seeing that change, because of some of the things we've put in? A lot of accessibility work that's done on websites also helps with search engine optimization. So looking at rankings and how we're performing in that space.
Shelby Mitchell: And then also looking at, you know, internal metrics are also important too. Are we seeing teams who are learning about digital accessibility and starting to implement it in their daily work? Are we seeing there? Are we seeing them evolve over time? Are we seeing them mature over time?
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Dom: Yeah, it's constant measurement, right? Measurement all the time. How are we doing? How did we do on this one? How do we do on that one?
But you know, going forward, you know if there was something you really wanted to get done in 2024, right, for your digital accessibility endeavors, if you will, something that you feel is unfinished, something that you really want to just roll out? Is this something that's top of mind in that department?
Pioneering Accessibility: The Evolution of Discover’s Digital Inclusion Efforts
Shelby Mitchell: Um, oh, gosh, that's a good question. I think for us, because we are still very new in the space. And you know, I—and I talk to people who have been in the space for, you know, much longer. They're like, "Well, we're just getting started too," even though they've been on the journey for 10, 15, 20 years.
Shelby Mitchell: But I think for me, the most important thing is ensuring that our design systems are set up in a way that we've created accessible components, the accessible building blocks, so that the rest of our teams—our design teams, our development teams—have a good starting point. And that's work that's already being done. But having that built out into a really big, strong library is going to be really important.
And then also, I know you said one thing, but I'm going to give two. I think the other big thing is continuing to build the number of research projects that we have, that we work with our consumer insights team on that bring in individuals with disabilities, because again, those lived experiences, listening in to the research that's being done, you know, understanding how somebody's leveraging their technology, and what's working and not working, that's really powerful. You can't, you know, you can talk about it as much as you want. But until people actually view and get to experience through observation, where somebody is struggling, or where they're succeeding.
Shelby Mitchell: That is, you know, a light bulb almost goes off, it's like, "Oh, now I get it." So I think those are probably the two biggest things that, you know, there's lots more we're doing, but those are probably the two biggest things that we really want to focus on this year. Because again, it's just going to continue to evolve, and build more use cases and case studies for the work that we're doing.
Dom: Yeah. I want to close with this question, you know, since it's such a personal story for you, and work is personal for you, personal is work, right? Was there a moment for you in your job where you just smiled, because it kind of came together? You know, you said, "This has been worth it," because of what just happened? Is there a moment that stands out like that? Or is it several kind of moments that have happened for you?
Shelby Mitchell: There have been several. I think the first one was my passion project turning into a full-time role. And then, one of the other big moments has been, and it's actually been multiple moments, but having different employees who may not have disclosed to anyone that they have a disability, saying, "You know, I'm having an issue with this communication that's coming out from a department; it's not accessible to me," and then going to that department and saying, "Hey, here are some things that we can do to make this communication accessible."
Shelby Mitchell: And then being able to follow up with that individual and say, "Is this better?" And, you know, again, our website and our mobile app are our main focus, but we also do a lot, you know, again, still as passion projects with partnering with our DE&I and AI team in different departments to improve our employee communications as well.
Shelby Mitchell: And so having individuals reach out to us and then knowing that we've made a few tiny changes, and it's made a huge difference.
Dom: Well, give yourself some credit too because they probably—I'm assuming they might feel like they can open up more because you live this as well, like you're in their world, you're in that world with your family. So that's amazing and Discover's lucky, super lucky to have you. You've got the marketing chops, the digital accessibility chops, and the passion for this from your personal life. It's just an amazing story. We so appreciate you sharing it with us and our audience. Shelby, thanks for coming on.
Shelby Mitchell: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Have a good one and best of luck. We'll catch up soon.
Dom: You too. All right. Thank you.
