Molly McCue

Spike Jonze’s movie Her is a love story that inspired Microsoft’s design studios in surprising ways. First, we partnered with Warner Brothers to host an advanced screening for the 300 people working on the company’s digital assistant, Cortana, so we could discuss the relationships at the heart of the interactions we design. Next, we conducted two-day design workshops with students in New York and Los Angeles, which were documented and released as films by Vice Media. The project was called Captivated by Her.

Using Her as a brief, we asked: how can human emotions inspire new interactions with technology and with each other?

I joined Amplify in 2018 and led the design and release of their new corporate website, now the number one source of leads for the company. As Director of Brand Marketing and Communications, I’ve helped expand local and national press coverage, launched social media groups hosting thousands of new educators, and redesigned the company’s onboarding experience.

A pioneer in K–12 education since 2000, Amplify serves five million students in all 50 states, including large urban districts such as New York City Department of Education, Chicago Public Schools, Denver Public Schools, San Francisco Unified School District, and Seattle Public Schools.

Do you know how the World Health Organization defines disability today? Not as a personal health problem, but as a mismatched interaction between the features of a person’s body and the features of their environment. That’s the heart of the inclusive design insights I wrote for Microsoft, which make the case for a mindful approach to inclusive design. The aim was to present human diversity as something more universal, dynamic, and inspiring for creatives.

This work was published under an open creative commons license and has inspired teams of designers and developers all over the world. It has been honored by IxDA, AIGA, and FastCo. In 2018, it was added to the permanent collection at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

In 2008, my friends and I founded a nonprofit that designed new ways for artists and churches to create together. We called it ByFor. For churches that rarely incorporated the visual arts into worship, a ByFor project became a way to make new relationships and foster the arts in their own communities. Early ByFor collaborators include musician Michael Card and artist Makoto Fujimura.

In 2015, Fuller Seminary adopted the ByFor model to form new artist residency programs. I worked with the Seattle residency during its pilot year and launched visual arts ministries for churches in the US and Canada. I’m writing about these adventures in a new project called The Making.

Smart Design was looking for a fresh way to articulate their own inclusive design principles, ones that pushed into broad realms of human diversity, such as gender, and could help them show clients the benefits of designing more inclusively.

Working with Smart’s research team, and drawing on their legendary partnership with OXO, I created a short guide for the studio that featured inclusive design 2.0 principles. I also wrote new insights on gender, how its meaning has shifted, why the binary is the construct, and what common approaches they might encounter with clients. In September 2018, I also participated in Smart’s event with Women in Innovation: Designing a Gender Inclusive Future.

Nerd alert: I cut my chops as a research assistant doing editorial work for two scholarly liberal arts journals: ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance and Poe Studies. In reality, the assistant part of my title meant spending lots of hours in the library fact-checking manuscripts. I loved every minute.

After writing for MIT’s Journal of Design and Science in 2018, I continued to work as a peer reviewer for projects published by the MIT Press. I also edited Mismatch, an MIT Press title on inclusive design authored by my friend and colleague Kat Holmes.

Connecting began as an insights project on the future of interaction design, a relatively new field for design schools in higher education. Keeping the branding to a minimum and focusing the storytelling on what we were learning, the team at Microsoft Design produced the first film and shared it with a few partners. Soon requests for screenings came pouring in from all over the world. I co-produced the second film in the series, Connecting: Makers, this time examining how future modes of creativity were impacting design.

The Connecting films were catalysts for thought-leadership events with design schools and partners in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Beijing, Stockholm, Umeå, London, Toronto, and Helsinki.

Discovering indie bands, promoting big brands, and recording incognito voiceovers—all in a day’s work creating fresh online experiences for the music incubator Zune. To help get the digital music service off the ground, I published multimedia content promoting thousands of major recording artists on the music store, working with industry creatives and marketing executives to curate exclusives and promotions.

I also helped translate all that creative goodness to teams on the technical side of the house, launching new site features that enabled easier publishing and better engagement.

In a big time of transition for Microsoft, the company’s disparate design studios rallied to create their own design agenda. Could we get clear about what we care about—where we want to go from here? Was there even such a thing as a unified Microsoft Design?

My team approached articulating the agenda with two questions. First, what kind of future do we envision? Second, what do we want to make? The result was an aspirational piece with a strong point of view about creative culture, the investments the team was making, and what drives design.

How can a digital assistant become truly personal? That’s a question Microsoft’s Cortana team was wrestling with. I helped them uncover some new perspectives by tracking down the best real-world personal assistants and interviewing them to find out what all great assistants do. I delivered those insights back to the team as a couple of engaging short films. Then the team went back to the drawing board and figured out how to apply the insights to the digital space.

Not only did the product team use the insights to refine the Cortana service, but the PR team made the interviews central to the press story of Cortana at launch.

I managed social media marketing for Dolphin, a popular mobile browser on the Android and iOS platforms with a user base of 50M. The challenge? Only a fraction of those users were active on social media. To get them engaged, I launched a new content strategy that included the company’s most successful giveaway, with 120,000 entries and social media growth of 30,000 fans in one month.

Our campaign was featured in the Facebook Studio Gallery.

In February 2018 the MIT Journal of Design and Science announced a call for essays on the topic of resisting reduction—imagining a future where humans flourish in an age machine intelligence. JoDS received 260 abstracts from around the world, of which 50 were invited to submit full-length essays, and 10 selected. My essay with Kat Holmes, Myth and the Making of AI, was one of the winners.

In the fall of 2014, Arcade published “Wayfinding as a Cultural Language,” my review of Makoto Fujimura’s film and retrospective monograph Golden Sea. The piece is in print only, at the moment.

Sometimes ideas arrive faster than a speeding bullet. Working in stealth mode with executives, I developed a vision for an incubation entertainment service featuring interactive comics and graphic novels.

In collaboration with the design venture team at Pioneer Studios, I wrote creative briefs, crafted pitch decks, and produced short films showcasing the project’s market opportunities, technology capabilities, and partner potential.

As anyone will tell you, I love books. So it was a dream come true to help a friend publish one. I edited Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design, a runaway hit by Kat Holmes, published by the MIT Press in 2018:

“Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn't work for left-handed people, for example, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. Something as simple as color choices can render a product unusable for millions. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion. In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion. Inclusive design methods—designing objects with rather than for excluded users—can create elegant solutions that work well and benefit all.”

Among other adventures in the early years of mobile, I program managed the launches of text messaging, data service, and local number portability for AT&T Wireless.

Wanting to flex my storytelling muscles a bit, I switched things up and managed public relations, internal communications, and web strategy for the CIO and senior executive team during Cingular’s $41B acquisition of AT&T Wireless, the largest merger of its time.

How do you immerse yourself in a dream about the future, but know when to snap yourself back into reality? At Microsoft Design, we turned it into a search for our totem. Totem was a quarterly internal publication I curated on trend and culture, inspiration and insight, future with a tight focus on what’s relevant for today’s business.

The publication evolved into a vibrant online presence and a place for new cross-studio conversations about what’s next.

Everyone and their mother claims to have worked on the pre-iPad tablet called Courier. But I did. Really. I advised executives on new go-to-market strategies, working with the Microsoft incubation venture at Pioneer Studios after their comps were leaked to the press and—to everyone’s surprise—they went viral. I pitched how the team could capitalize on the positive publicity, build community, and complete the product with the help of fans.

The team that worked on Courier went on to start a new venture called FiftyThree, and I helped them launch their award-winning iPad app Paper.

In a move away from a one-size-fits-all approach, Office was incubating brand new ways to market its products to specific industry verticals in retail, education, and healthcare. I aligned audience segmentation for the effort and led a team in creating custom video, marcom, and SDK solutions for the company sales teams that make it happen.

This work helped make SharePoint Office’s fastest growing billion-dollar business.