E2.1: A Conversation with Catherine Devine
Perspectives on Experience Design from Business Strategy Leader, Microsoft, and formerly Chief Digital Officer at AMNH
Catherine Devine is currently Business Strategy Leader - Libraries & Museums, at Microsoft. She was formerly Chief Digital Officer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Catherine and I had a wonderfully in-depth chat about Experience Design from many perspectives.
Catherine is @cmdevine on Twitter and LinkedIn.
CreativeStack: What is Experience Design for you?
Catherine Devine: We've been talking for a long time around, you know, when you build an app, when you build a website, when you build whatever extended reality, we're like, oh, there's a user experience piece of this, right?
When we've been talking about that forever, and that actually added value.
I used to say that, like back in the 90s, there was still a time when the people who created the interface were the people who did the programming.
But as a general rule, programmers are not good at doing UI or user experience. It's not just UI but also what is the experience? Maybe 10 years ago, we started to recognize that this idea of just being focused on one channel was crazy because people don't exist in one channel. And I think that has become even more so.
So now I think at least in my definition, I don't even think about what's digital and physical.
Just start with what's the right experience for what the person is trying to achieve. What's the holistic experience, regardless of channel? Don't think about the channel as physical, digital, whatever.
What are you trying to achieve and then how do you get there?
Here's an example I'm dealing with right now. I'm trying to send money overseas. It's a pain. I was coming from the point of view of a task that I'm trying to do. Not from the perspective of what features the app or website should have.
CreativeStack: I like thinking about Experience Design in terms of dimensionality of channels. I think historically we've thought about it very much in one dimension. And we are now evolving to that point where our environments can be activated in many different ways. It's not just two dimensional screens we are interfacing with. We now have layers of sensory interfaces. Tying all of those layers together is really where Experience Design shines. The distinction between UX and XD is that the user goes away and we need to think in terms of the space reacting to the user, rather than the user reacting to the interface.
Catherine Devine: Yeah, it goes back to something that's been around for a while. Before the internet, before all of these connected devices, we just had personal computers and mainframes.
We used to get drilled into us that you always build to the requirements, which I know sounds so old fashioned now, right? You defined what you were trying to build, and then that's what you built. Technology is not the reason to do something, you're trying to achieve something.
And in those days you had to, because technology was so expensive and inaccessible. So for me that's always been there, the idea of it's never technology leading, it's always “what are you trying to achieve?”.
Whether it's the fact that I'm like going to the bank to deposit money, or wire the money somewhere, or it's coming to a museum, it's unrelated to the technology. Technology just provides the tools to get there.
Then of course it has to flow between all the channels, right? That’s a tactical piece of it, right?
CreativeStack: Yes for sure. The design aspect that gets challenging is when you step away from the end user experience, and start thinking about how to actually build it. You may want to send money, and then you realize there are a lot of different pieces that need to talk to each other to make the experience smooth and like magic. And when people pull that off, there’s this sense of “this is incredible”.
Spatial design has a lot of that. In your experience you have had to deal with this challenge from a client perspective at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), and now you’re doing so from a vendor organization perspective at Microsoft. How do you think about, and talk about those solution spaces?
Catherine Devine: Yeah, well, I don't think I've got it all worked out! From my time at AMNH, when we worked on the AMNH Explorer Mobile App, we were thinking about the idea of “Explorer Everywhere”. The mobile-app was a construct that fit the founding that we had.
But I really think if we had a do over, we would have thought about it as what's the overall experience? What's the Explorer experience? Which really when it comes down to forgetting what you name it, it's like, what is the experience of the visitor visiting the museum?
What do we want it to be? And then part of that is information anywhere anytime, right?
I think we would have found that there are multiple ways to do that for all sorts of visitors. We just built for one use-case, which is the visitor who wants to use a smartphone. The thinking has evolved in the years that have gone by, but that’s what we were trying to get to.
As a general rule (there may be some museum exceptions), it's almost impossible to get museums to get beyond just talking about a single channel right now, whether that’s website, app, the extended reality experience, the podcast, the audio tour, whatever. It’s hard to get people to think about how to bring all those things together.
I think websites are one element of a larger ecosystem of tools. But we need to get people to realize it’s not all things to all people. The conversation back in 2010, 2011 was we need to have a mobile app. But we needed to have mobile-web, as a responsive solution as well, right? And then we got into virtual reality and then we got into augmented reality.
But the conversation has been driven by the available tools and the trend, not by the experience that we're trying to create!
That was my experience at AMNH, where half, if not more, of the conversation, was trying to get people to think differently than just the individual channel.
CreativeStack: Do you think this is because of a lack of education? On the vendor side everyone's trying to push as far as possible. Clients, on the other hand, are trying to stay safe so they don’t get blamed for spending on something that does not work. Do you think there’s some friction in that relationship? Or is it more fundamental, that it’s hard to think outside of individual channels?
Catherine Devine: I think fundamentally, at its core, people are used to thinking in terms of channels and I think it comes back to how organizations are structured. There’s this ongoing conversation that we all need to have digital teams, right? Because nobody knew how to do digital in museums. Or other industries for that matter!
So you have to have a digital team. And I believed in a central digital team for a while because nobody else was going to push that agenda. It's not gonna happen organically in an organization.
The oxymoron of that is because you now have a Digital Team, then everyone's like, well, digital means that it's about digital channels, right? And then you lose that whole bit about why it exists in the first place!
People's propensity to stick with what they know just amazes me.
I realize that's the human condition, but it's hard for me because I'm not that way. You just have to recognize that most people are.
I've often said that the things that we do today didn't happen 50 years ago. Some part of progress has to be doing things differently, in new or in different ways. When I started working I started on Mainframes. They aren’t completely gone, but if I had never evolved from mainframes I would be pretty much unemployable and irrelevant.
The same is true of museums. They have to work out how to continually evolve instead of spending so much energy protecting The way they've done it.
Back to your question on this “vendor tension”. One problem is just systemic - people thinking in channels because of that organizational structure.
The second one is that the experiences that are front facing, consumer facing, get a lot of press. They are done by studios, and get a lot of press. It's good for the studio, it's good for the museum, etcetera.
But it reinforces this idea that the one-off, super expensive thing is digital. And of course it's so much more. So the problem is a combination of those things, and a general lack of digital literacy.
When I say digital literacy, I mean understanding what technology can do, and how you can use it. Which is beyond thinking in terms of coding solutions.
CreativeStack: But there's also a sense of magic to a lot of technology, not just in museums but in industry at large. It’s often hard to convey why some things that seem complicated are actually easy for technology, and other things that are super simple for humans are very hard for technology. On top of that technology is so jargon filled that it makes everyone feel stupid. Looking at a company like Microsoft we can see how extensive technology evolution is. A company that made the operating system and office products is integral to hardware and software in Experience Design (with Kinect, Hololens, and cognitive services). Do you think that we need to rethink how we disseminate an understanding of how these technologies work? To make even the groundwork feel less daunting.
Catherine Devine: Yes and no. I guess I'm kind of in two minds as to how deep everybody should go. For example, I’m not a doctor. i have a consumer level of information about health. I don't know most things, but I know enough to get through life.
I think the more important piece is distinguishing coding from understanding what technology can do.
There are lots of campaigns for all the STEM programs, the coding for girls and women. Those kinds of things reinforce his idea that technology is only coding. I'm not suggesting that there’s anything wrong with those programs, it's just that, as you know, there's more to it.
Coding is not enough. Coding is what we used to do in the 80s and 90s. That's how we ended up with these terrible interfaces that only programmers can come up with, with all due respect.
There’s this binary idea of either I understand code and I therefore understand technology, or I’m scared of technology. There seems to be no middle ground.
Technology is about concepts and understanding what the possibilities are conceptually, rather than the actual implementation of technology.
CreativeStack I want to ask about your role at Microsoft. How is the final user-experience considered with the technologies coming out of Microsoft, such as hololens, spatial sensors, etc? Are there conversations around how to build better user experiences?
Catherine Devine: As a company we sort of see two spectrums. One is the product. The other is the industry use-cases for those products. It sounds great in theory, but in practice it's a little harder. It's hard for people to separate the product solution from the use case.
A great example is the work that we've done with the mixed reality team, where we put aside all the solutions and we actually have a conversation about what are the museum use-cases for what we term as “immersive experiences”. Whether that be Hololens or a smartphone or virtual reality.
The idea is to come up with an example of something that will transform museum. Then come up with a series of ideas, and talk to museums and get their responses to that. We also don't want to go to market with something that does not resonate with the industry, but the key sort of ground rules to that conversation is “what are the experiences?”.
A great example of that is we looked at lots and lots of examples of immersive experiences or virtual experiences. But one that has seemed to resonate the most is an unexpected one, potentially.
Which is, how can you do research on collection items when that collection is virtual.
Typically museums move objects, around the world, around the country, etcetera.. They're fragile, they are not available for other researchers and so on. When you look at products like Hololens, you can now do a lot of research without actually having to move the object.
In all the conversations, that use-case seemed to have more traction than, say, the typical example of putting it in the visitor experience.
The conversation we had as a company was around what museums need, what are the possibilities they do this across all industries? As a company we are structured as people who look at the product, the engineers who build those products, and the people who look at industry.
I'm an example of an industry person. And we try to express industry use cases, and look at how the products map in to build a solution.
CreativeStack: I love that. At the end of the day that's still a benefit to the end user, since it activates the content, but perhaps through a curatorial process. Sometimes that activation doesn't mean you need to be talked to by technology, or carry around a screen around with you.
Catherine Devine: Right, so then we look at where our products line up to that solution?
Whether that’s storage, Azure cloud for rendering images fast, Hololens for being immersed in the experience.
We also have a use case that people haven't necessarily thought about in museums. There's a lot of export laws and insurance laws around moving objects, particularly across countries, and even within a country. For example, there’s only one specimen and that’s a lot of risk. and in some cases those specimens are just too big to move.
So it's solving a problem and it's expanding and transforming capabilities, to no longer limit yourself to the physical research on a specimen, which is what we've done for hundreds of years.
Now to do that globally we get into this whole conversation though about the digital divide. Does everyone have the same access?
And the answer is, not globally, right? But that's the limiting factor. But otherwise, I mean obviously Microsoft thinks about how much compute can happen in the cloud. When we get to render in the cloud and then then real time display from that, that's going to be transformative, right?
CreativeStack: Yes, that’s the dream right? When spaces can actually be reactive to you. But then we need to define our common gestures and interfaces to those spaces and systems. Like a new vocabulary for engagement.
Catherine Devine: Exactly. We've become used to a way of life we didn't have 20 years ago and that we've forgotten that we didn't have. There’s a certain expectation that I can get information anywhere with my phone. But I can't always because of connectivity, and I'm not used to that lag time in some countries.
That's definitely the direction that it's going and if you think about it it makes perfect sense. I know we're biased at Microsoft, but it's like you can only put so much capacity on the end device, and it's clearly going to limit you.
Where I have this conversation all the time is around digitization of images. So, so many museums are digitizing images. 3D digitizing and then trying to render the final image, merging it together on a desktop computer. And it takes hours and hours to do that.
The reason they don't want to use the cloud is because of a perception that it's expensive.
But actually that cloud, as you know, you rent for the time that you use it, and you can get it done in minutes instead of hours.
CreativeStack: Are there any interesting technologies that you’ve been particularly impressed by in the last year?
Catherine Devine:Microsoft Mesh is definitely worth having a look at. It’s like the next generation of extended reality. Basically, instead of us looking at each other on the screen, we're actually holograms. It's amazing.
It’s a product just being released now, so it's still early and it's going to take a couple of years to mature. But I think it has the potential to be super game changing. It gets us out of this idea that we have to interact through a 2-D experience.
Suddenly it's like what I was talking about with mixed-reality-based research on collections. Suddenly now you're all doing it in the same space regardless of where we are in the world you are.
More importantly, it's multi-sensory. It's collaborative. So, for example, people from all over the world can go to the same museum together and experience something together.
I can come to your museum, and you can take me on a tour even though I am physically not there. That’s where I think the future is a Microsoft Mesh. I think it’s a first step.
CreativeStack: Thank you for taking the time to join us, Catherine Devine.