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jordank

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Product strategy + UX advising, consulting, and investing.

Early involvement at DuckDuckGo, Evidation, and Springshot among others.

jordan at duck dot com

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Having rented a Tesla via Hertz last year, here are some quick remembrances:

-The car was not charged fully when I rented it.

-I had to park in a pay parking lot at a shopping mall to charge the car. Charging to 100% cost me $7 but took 30 minutes of my time.

-The UX of most of the basic car functions was much harder to learn than a typical rental car. I'm sure that Tesla's UX quirks start to feel normal after a while, but I had trouble locating basic car functions and had to text with Tesla-owning friends for advice.

None of these things made me want to rent a Tesla again.

“The tuition for full-time students who are Arizona residents will be paid for by the state at no cost to families.

Students who live in the US, but outside Arizona, will pay $9,900 per year tuition. Students who live outside the US will pay $12,900 per year.”

One factor missing from most analyses of scooter companies are the sheer cost of insuring scooters long term. Insurance rates are likely based on the assumption that scooter companies can disclaim against any user damages (injury, death, etc) but companies can't disclaim against gross negligence and there are many, many legal actions against Lime and other scooter companies (disclaimer/source: I'm a plaintiff in one of these actions).

Failure rates are known to be fairly high and accidents are common [1]. I was on a Lime that had a brake failure and I was pretty badly injured. Lime themselves have indicated that the failure rate was around .00045%, but that's still 450 brake failures per million rides [2].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/scooter-use-... [2] https://www.li.me/blog/safety-update-february-2019

My wife’s Slack account was closed yesterday.

She created the account while traveling in Cuba (legally) years ago and hasn’t been back to Cuba or any other sanctioned country since.

She is a cofounder of an org that uses Slack heavily and has now lost access to all her messages and files from the past couple years of work.

There appears to be no appeal process here.

These are good points — many have tended to look at just the consumer applications. It may be that the economics lend themselves more to industrial transport or logistics than they do to moving bodies.

A couple more points here:

1. A lot of people who care about organic and farm-to-table ethos already live in areas with significant market coverage. Those people will tend to have existing behaviors — GoodEggs sought to displace these. This can be hard if existing players do good-enough job.

2. The paradox of some delivery services is that the people who need them most are sometimes the most economically unviable customers (because they are geographically spread out, because they are lacking in funds or both).

Sometimes the products that companies need to buy aren't yet being made (and can't yet be purchased as components). In this case there is some financial risk associated with producing a new product — videos and other materials can help convince this player to take that risk.

Publishing videos to the world may have issues, but these sorts of videos can have extreme internal value (the OP mentions this). I've worked on quite of a few of these — they've turned out to be useful tools in securing budgets and coordinating teams.

These concept videos can also be useful when an ingredient brand wants to push other players in their industry forward. When company A needs company B to buy into building new types of hardware, far-out concept videos can go a long way. By publishing concept videos, firms can essentially create reference designs for the future.

Interaction designer was previously the preferred title for many designers...until it became completely co-opted.

I wouldn't get too attached to the title UX Designer either, since that term will no doubt get diluted as well — but as the article states it does give people something to grasp immediately.

Another choice comment:

On each planet is something ice on one, sand, lava, on another, etc., This is where we get our weather from in some ways. Our Earth is in the solar system of these other planets revolving around them.

I'm just not sure that's how it works...