Megan Leigh McDonald

To start off, just want to explain why I haven’t been writing for the past few months. After relocating for a new job up in San Jose at PayPal (yay), I am starting to really feel at home and making some time to devote to my writing again. So on with the show…

Dreaming of Solving Problems
The other morning I struggled to wake up while listening to NPR (yes, I know…doesn’t exactly get the blood pumping but I like it).  I laid there like a quietly vibrating half set brick, my mind sliding in and out of consciousness. I remember work being part of the dream scenarios. In the midst of this I had a very sober thought about some of the problems I was trying to solve in my projects — that actually I define my own life as the problems that I choose to solve.

Indeed, man in general can define our own history in terms of the problems we chose to solve at given times. For instance, early man took on the problems of how to process the raw foods they hunted or gathered into more easily consumed forms, i. e. how to make fire.  The sixties were ‘How do I get/give more love?’ The seventies were ‘How do I get more sex?’ And the eighties were ‘How do I get more time?’ The nineties seems to have been ‘How do I get more happiness?’ The 2000s are not over yet but so far seem to be asking the question ‘How do I get more balance?’

Each decade really can be compressed and defined by one question. I am considering illustrating this idea on a time-line to put it into more of a cultural evolutionary perspective.

 So what does this have to do with Usability and User Experience? 

Everyday at work I advocate and take on a somewhat nurturing and protective role of ‘my/our’ users. I do think of them as real people that I might know, like cousins or friends of my parents in the small town that our family comes from. They all have stories and needs. Every day, I think of them when I must dig deeper as I struggle to understand the product and the vast technology behind it in a highly diverse cultural environment.

What I do is not just work. I choose to solve problems that affect people’s financial and small business problems. I seek to be of service in facilitating between users and business needs. It’s a crucial role in our ever-changing tech industry today and I’m certainly not the only one, so I have no worries that I’m Atlas about to be crushed by a lofty goal. And I think as much as I can own the problems I choose to solve, the larger entity that I work for also chooses to solve problems for users and makes it possible for me to advocate as I do for better experiences on our sites.

I reflect on people I admire like Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Sylvia Earle, Rachel Carson and other great people or entities who affected a lot of change. Those people and  organizations chose to take on a problem that probably seemed so large and unconquerable that most people simply gave in and understandably ‘let go’. I’m quite fascinated by people who despite the odds, struggled, focused and made progress against highly complex sets of circumstances. And I’m also fascinated by companies who do the same. I am left questioning whether the business of solving problems online is philosophically any different than anyone else solving a social problem.  It’s all a form of ‘User Experience’…called the ‘human experience’.