The Extentia Blog: A Personal Perspective on UX — Then and Now

By: Extentia
 
PUNE, India - Oct. 23, 2019 - PRLog -- Where it started for me with UX was a soap wrapper when I was 12-years-old. The spelling of the soap's name was different from the televised ad and worse — the spelling, once the wrapper was opened, was something else! Sure, I wrote them with pen and paper, and couriered my letter to the address on the wrapper.
In 2000 — just after graduation — I joined an internet media company, which was big and well-known back then. This was just years after the term 'UX' (just two letters) was coined. I was deputed to the team that was building this grand shopping portal.
Terms like 'Fly to' and fancier, than a simple 'Buy now'. Well-hidden shopping carts. Deals on the home page that could never be found. No clues to check out. Strange right to left Arabic-style layouts to appear cool.
So we created this 'UX Lab' if you will, to figure out how to get products to sell. After all, we'd aggregated some of the largest brands of the day — J. Crew, The GAP, and the now defunct Toys R' Us among many others. Very obviously they wanted some bang for their buck on this fancy new online mall.
Our modus operandi was we'd grab people off the street, and promise them a tad more than minimum wage for their time. Then, we'd fix a fancy 'eye-ball' movement sensor on them, and display the shopping portal to them. Their task was to try and buy XYZ product. Yes, really 'try and buy' was the instruction.
Where were they looking to find, say, a Gucci bag? They were looking at 'fashion and accessories' when we wanted 'travel and leisure'. Back to the UX drawing board.
I'd mentioned silent chat-bots above. Man, were they a considered a fancy user experience then — never mind they did nothing! Then they started to respond and were still useless through the aughts. In the next decade, they got smarter but continued to give clueless answers for the most part for shoppers and service users. Companies are like 'They have a chat-bot? Gimme one too!'. This is not about voice-assistants on your phone, by the way.
What's happening now? 'Hi, I'm Laura. Can I help you?' seems to save money for her employers for she's not a human being. But she doesn't really help me much. Yet. From my experience, these bots can be conned for refunds and other things. Ask me how.
There's a long way to go here.
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Source:Extentia
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Tags:UX/UI
Industry:Technology
Location:Pune - Maharashtra - India
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