Got any examples of doing UX before you ever heard of UX?

Hi Guys,

Was looking through some old work from College recently (I won’t even say how long ago that was). I studied Graphic Design, but the first year we also studied a lot of Product design.
After year 1 the course split into Graphic Designers and Product Designers.
As part of my final show I created an corporate identity for a fictional Oil Company “ARQ” and decided to also create a Engine Oil bottle out of wood. The idea being to help showcase the brand.

Thanks to a lot of help from the product design brethren, it turned out pretty darn good. Found it recently and remembered doing a lot of work into its ergonomics and I guess ‘usability’.

So turns out I was doing usability design all those years ago. Whoo Whoo!

Now must go and find my old sketches and notes. I think the timber bottle is in my parents loft, gotta get that back.

Paddy

I think my best ux story was from around 2004. The company I worked for only sold through sales reps, so when people came to view our products, they had to contact a sales rep to purchase. Support was getting a ton of phone calls because people could not figure out how to contact a sales rep and we had a high bounce rate on product pages.

I did some “basic” research and developed a flash (back when flash was considered cool) widget for the product pages that allowed users to look up a sales rep right there, without reloading the page, based on their zip code. It then stored that rep info in a cookie so whenever they went to another product page or came back to the page in the future it displayed the rep right there for them to contact.

From what I understood, measurable sales increases were in the 100 million range according to market lead generation. (was a 1.5 billion/ year company)

** Cant believe it, but the page im talking about is actually archived on way back machine! **
Yikes… my designs back then… =/ lol

http://web.archive.org/web/20040406025713/http://www.liebert.com/dynamic/displayproduct.asp?id=1054&cycles=60Hz

From someone that changes his own oil, this is awesome. The design makes total sense to me. I never understood why they didnt make more of an angled spout like this on oil bottles.
Very cool Paddy

This is a great thread and has jogged my memory on a few things. Back in 1994 I started a after-school care scheme for children where I was the manager. My duties included creating the service from scratch; not just for the children but for the parents too. I had overall responsibility for our marketing, communication, activities and all administration. I designed various forms and information for the parents. 21 years later, to my astonishment, is exact same forms are still being used today!!! You can view them here. http://www.sascs.org.uk/#/forms/4575244134 (it is not my website design!)