UMSI alumna Katie McCurdy is building for the AI era on UMSI foundations

Katie McCurdy (MSI ’10) has spent more than a decade using technology to improve patient experiences in health care. Today, she’s navigating one of the most significant shifts in the field yet: the rise of AI-powered tools. 

After launching her career at the global design and technology agency R/GA and building a practice as a user experience consultant in health care, McCurdy founded Pictal Health, a startup that helps patients build visual health histories to better communicate their experiences, diagnoses and treatments to clinicians. She recently joined BETA Technologies, an electric aviation company based in Vermont, and is bringing human-centered design to manufacturing processes.

As emerging technologies redefine the role of designers, McCurdy continues to rely on the research, synthesis and prototyping skills she developed at UMSI. While AI tools are accelerating the process ⁠— and even helping her build her own product ⁠— she says the core principles of human-centered design remain constant.

“Everything’s changing right now. The role of a designer is very different from what it looked like in 2010. It’s going to be very different even a year or two from now,” McCurdy says. “I’m trying to figure out where I fit in this new AI world, but it’s also empowering. It’s empowering to be able to work on my own product and be able to keep moving it forward using these new tools that are available to all of us.” 

In the Q&A below, McCurdy reflects on building a resilient career in design, embracing AI-era tools and drawing on foundational UMSI training to stay agile in a rapidly evolving profession.

UMSI: What is your current position, and what do you do in that position? 

Katie McCurdy: I’ve worked as a user experience consultant on and off for the past 13 years, helping different types of health care organizations improve their products. 

Now, I’m at BETA helping bring design to manufacturing processes and other areas of the organization. As part of that position I do a lot of user research and bring feedback and ideas back to the development team. We are also experimenting with new ways of collaborating on products, using AI and “vibe coding.”

Aside from that,  I also have a startup called Pictal Health, which is a way for patients to make a visual health history so they can more effectively tell their story to their doctors. We have a product that basically helps people build a picture of their symptoms over time, their medications and treatments, whether they helped or not, and they’re color-coded accordingly. It’s sort of their whole life story from birth until today, and a way for patients to communicate whether something helped or not, or if they got a diagnosis that seems wrong to them. It’s a way for them to better indicate what’s going on and what they’re thinking. 

I like how you incorporated whether or not the patient agreed with a diagnosis. 

That happens a lot, especially with people who are searching for a diagnosis and maybe not getting answers. Often they’re told it’s depression or something that doesn’t feel right to them. Now I’m using AI coding tools to work on this, which is really exciting. 

What does a day in your life look like? 

In my new job, I spend quite a bit of time in meetings or doing user research. Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time on a presentation to help communicate the future state of our product. I’m also diving into vibe coding tools to see how we can impact the current design of our product. 

How do you apply UMSI skills in your work? 

I think that we all came out of our program with really strong skills in user research. That’s always been one of my unique strengths, maybe something that sets me apart from other designers. I’m still using research and synthesis skills, making sense of what we hear from people. Definitely doing a lot of prototyping still. 

I think AI is changing everything about the design process, making it more efficient in some ways and just completely changing it in other ways, but there are still core concepts I rely on that I learned from my time at UMSI.

Have you been able to build upon your knowledge of emerging technologies like AI since graduation? 

Yeah, I mean, everything’s changing right now. The role of a designer is very different from what it looked like in 2010. It’s going to be very different even a year or two from now. I’m trying to figure out where I fit in this new AI world, but it’s also empowering. It’s empowering to be able to work on my own product and be able to keep moving it forward using these new tools that are available to all of us. 

What was your motivation for entering this field and getting your master’s degree in information science? 

I had been taking web development classes before I decided to apply for graduate school, and I was also doing a big project at work. I worked in a customer service call center, and we had an internal help website with something like 4,000 pages on it, and there was a lot of duplication. It was really messy. So I was helping to process and reduce that, to make sense of it. I found that really fun. 

I also found a job listing for an interaction designer at Google, and I felt that I really wanted to do that job. I looked at the job requirements, and one requirement was a master’s in human-computer interaction ⁠— so I just decided to apply to the University of Michigan. I’m from Michigan, and it was a good fit for my personal strengths.

What is your most valuable UMSI experience?

I took a class with a professor named Michael McQuaid ⁠— he’s no longer at UMSI ⁠— I think it was Interaction Design. It was just a really good class, it thoroughly prepared us to go through a design process from research through prototyping. He was a really, really good teacher.

I also value the contacts and friends I made at UMSI. I’ve been in touch recently with some of them ⁠—  I’ve kept some friendships going, which is cool, and they were really helpful in my recent job search. It’s been 15 years since graduation, and it’s special to me that I can still reach out and connect with these folks. 

How do you get your foot in the door of a career path after earning a master’s degree? 

I had an internship at VMware, a virtual computing company, between my years in grad school. Then I met someone at a conference who worked at a big agency in New York City. I ended up going to work for that agency, R/GA, for two years. That was sort of how I started my career. 

R/GA is a design and technology agency that works with big brands like Verizon and Nike. I worked with Johnson & Johnson. The client would want work on an app, website, platform or something like that, and we would design and build it.

After R/GA, I moved back to Vermont, and I was a remote consultant until very recently, when I took the new job at BETA.  I needed to get out of the city and have a healthier quality of life. 

Would you like to share one piece of advice for undergraduates and new graduates trying to enter and keep up with the information field? 

I think people right now need to embrace AI and figure out what jobs are going to look like. Even a year or two from now, jobs are going to be pretty different from what they are today. I think we’re all just trying to embrace it, use the tools and figure out how we can continue to add value.