Katie McCurdy is a User Experience (UX) Designer, researcher, strategist, and creative problem-solver. She focuses much of her work on healthcare.
Chrissy Casavant: What drew you to healthcare design initially?
Katie McCurdy: I was drawn to healthcare because of my personal experiences as a patient from the time I was 13 years old - I loved my work as a designer, and I was excited to be able to do that work in a field that would help me make a difference for other patients (and doctors). I was working at an agency in NYC and wasn’t doing very well with my health, so I moved back to Vermont with my husband and started to consult with healthcare startups and organizations. That was 9 years ago!
C: What is a challenge about working in healthcare?
K: A few ideas: Larger organizations are resistant to change. Healthcare is needlessly complex at times, and appropriately complex at other times. It can be hard to make change happen.
C: What do you enjoy the most about it?
K: I have really enjoyed working on projects that can make an immediate impact - especially through my work at an academic medical center, where I consulted for a few years. There, we also had great access to patient and clinician collaborators and testers, which was very rewarding.
Chrissy Casavant: What drew you to healthcare design initially?
Katie McCurdy: I was drawn to healthcare because of my personal experiences as a patient from the time I was 13 years old - I loved my work as a designer, and I was excited to be able to do that work in a field that would help me make a difference for other patients (and doctors). I was working at an agency in NYC and wasn’t doing very well with my health, so I moved back to Vermont with my husband and started to consult with healthcare startups and organizations. That was 9 years ago!
C: What is a challenge about working in healthcare?
K: A few ideas: Larger organizations are resistant to change. Healthcare is needlessly complex at times, and appropriately complex at other times. It can be hard to make change happen.
C: What do you enjoy the most about it?
K: I have really enjoyed working on projects that can make an immediate impact - especially through my work at an academic medical center, where I consulted for a few years. There, we also had great access to patient and clinician collaborators and testers, which was very rewarding.
C: What role does accessibility play in your work?
K: It’s been a part of most projects in some way or another. There is accessibility on the web, and also contrast and color choice concerns for print materials. We even worked on redesigning wayfinding in the physical space of the hospital, where physical mobility was a key concern.
C: What does your typical research process look like?
K: Depends - usually some up-front research like interviews, observation, looking at survey results or any past analytics, baseline usability testing. Sometimes some co-creative workshops. Then usually there is some testing of prototypes all along the way.
C: Sometimes it’s hard to transition from collecting content to actually designing. How do you go from research to designing a visual identity?
K: I’m not a visual designer so don’t do visual identities, but usually there is a pivot from synthesizing research to ‘making’ - usually brainstorming starts with some prompts or principles that have come directly from the research. It’s helpful to set aside a working session, ideally as a team, to kick off the process of coming up with ideas and make sure we are thinking of as many solutions as we can before we start narrowing in on one.
K: It’s been a part of most projects in some way or another. There is accessibility on the web, and also contrast and color choice concerns for print materials. We even worked on redesigning wayfinding in the physical space of the hospital, where physical mobility was a key concern.
C: What does your typical research process look like?
K: Depends - usually some up-front research like interviews, observation, looking at survey results or any past analytics, baseline usability testing. Sometimes some co-creative workshops. Then usually there is some testing of prototypes all along the way.
C: Sometimes it’s hard to transition from collecting content to actually designing. How do you go from research to designing a visual identity?
K: I’m not a visual designer so don’t do visual identities, but usually there is a pivot from synthesizing research to ‘making’ - usually brainstorming starts with some prompts or principles that have come directly from the research. It’s helpful to set aside a working session, ideally as a team, to kick off the process of coming up with ideas and make sure we are thinking of as many solutions as we can before we start narrowing in on one.
C: It’s easy, for me at least, to get weighed down with content details. How do you approach synthesizing lots of content?
K: It’s my favorite thing to do - when I am working alone I often do this somewhat intuitively, finding patterns and moving information around in a large document first. With a team, it’s good to get research data down on sticky notes and group them together - an exercise called affinity diagramming that I learned in grad school.
C: How do you know your work has made an impact?
K: Measure results in some way - when working as a consultant, sometimes I don’t see the long-term outcome of my work. But I usually have tested the solution with people, which provides insight and helps us predict what the impact might be. I have also heard anecdotal stories about the impact of the work. For a pediatric inpatient orientation guide that I co-created with the hospitals patient and family centered care group; they heard stories from nurses about how helpful the content was for parents staying with their kids.
C: I absolutely love the Designer’s Oath that you wrote. It totally gets to the heart of healthcare design. Where did this project originate? Is this oath something that you refer to frequently? I’m also curious about the “simplest solution”— what does that mean to you?
K: This originated with the agency Mad*Pow a number of years ago - they asked me to contribute.
K: It’s my favorite thing to do - when I am working alone I often do this somewhat intuitively, finding patterns and moving information around in a large document first. With a team, it’s good to get research data down on sticky notes and group them together - an exercise called affinity diagramming that I learned in grad school.
C: How do you know your work has made an impact?
K: Measure results in some way - when working as a consultant, sometimes I don’t see the long-term outcome of my work. But I usually have tested the solution with people, which provides insight and helps us predict what the impact might be. I have also heard anecdotal stories about the impact of the work. For a pediatric inpatient orientation guide that I co-created with the hospitals patient and family centered care group; they heard stories from nurses about how helpful the content was for parents staying with their kids.
C: I absolutely love the Designer’s Oath that you wrote. It totally gets to the heart of healthcare design. Where did this project originate? Is this oath something that you refer to frequently? I’m also curious about the “simplest solution”— what does that mean to you?
K: This originated with the agency Mad*Pow a number of years ago - they asked me to contribute.