Ford GoBike have to be some of the worst, most ill-maintained bikes in the city. The product quality is terrible compared to the competition - half the bikes have mechanical issues, the electrical bikes were hazardous.
I was an early subscriber given how cheap it was, but I often struggled to find a bike that worked.
Blah - seems like a sensationalist clickbait article, just cashing in on the current media cycle.
I'm honestly more shocked at the myopic discussion in this thread, quite lacking in understanding the range of motivations of people who work there. I'm a long-time engineering employee, and seen a lot of ups and downs. To build a service that was used by a few thousand in one city to millions all over the world has been one of the most exciting jobs I've had, with great feats of engineering and operational execution. Numbers don't lie that we've built a reliable service - the negative media cycles don't hurt the business. There have been a ton of growing pains, with a lot of agenda-driven empire builders, bro-ey-ness, and general lack of careful cultural development that have contributed to the current situation, and left quite a few rankled employees in its wake. Whether it will come out strong from this situation is up to the strength of the leadership, and we'll see what the remedy holds.
FWIW, I have seen a huge uptick in recruiter inbounds in the last few weeks (understandably), with all the best names Facebook, Google, Amazon and Tesla on the list.
Could someone link to examples of her work? The article reads as if it's more of a fashionable contrarianism, mostly for the sake of it. I would like to experience her work in detail tho. Sadly, a clever name like 'Amy G Dala' fools google and doesn't turn up anything.
Yep, Daly City is pretty miserable climate wise. It'll often be covered in fog and cold in the middle of a summer day, while a few miles away it's sunny and warm. You also have to deal with mold and rust issues.
I've looked at apartments there a couple times, and while it's vastly more affordable than SF, the climate + distance outweighs the upsides (for me anyway).
Their mobile app is one of the most poorly designed and poorly executed major tech products out there. For a company that hires probably a thousand engineers, there has been very little improvements on the web and mobile properties in over 4 years. For a product that's innately social, local and realtime, it has missed most of the enabled affordances of years past.
I'm surprised that there isn't much competition. I was traveling recently, and found Zomato's app to be much superior.
I really can't believe how bad it is (on iOS at least).
Two rather signifiant UX issues on my end are:
1. bad image resolution (do they resize pictures to be smaller?); this is also worse from yelp.com
2. Why is the regular swipe from edge of screen to go to the previous screen overridden to move from review to review? (same issue with GMail app though too)
> Why is the regular swipe from edge of screen to go to the previous screen overridden to move from review to review? (same issue with GMail app though too)
I completely share your frustration here. I actually met a Yelp iOS engineer once and asked them about this. They said the idea is that it's supposed to feel like the way you navigate photos in albums on iOS; their expectation (whoever designs Yelp's iOS UX) is that users want to read many reviews and don't skim the review previews first to find the ones they like.
I showed them how I prefer to browse reviews: skim the previews, find a promising looking one [Yelp review signal/noise is terrible], "drill into" it, back out, continue until I've read enough reviews to make a judgment. They said they understood my POV, but stood by the assertion that most users don't use the app this way. Maybe they have metrics to justify that.
I can understand why they'd see it that way. But my preferred UX is exactly what you described. I want to find a review that looks like it may hit on what I want to read about specifically, and then exit out as needed.
I find Foursquare's app much much superior than all-- too bad they're gotten a confused reputation over the years. But from an app UI/UX perspective, it shocks me why anyone would use Yelp's app over Foursquare.
Twizoo is also a new competitor that takes a completely different approach by getting reviews from Twitter. It also uses a data visualization over lists which is interesting. However, I think it's only live in a handful of US cities.
> I'm surprised that there isn't much competition.
In Europe, TripAdvisor is probably the #1 most used app in this market. Although I don't personally really like it either, not so much because of any technical problem, but because they've chosen to be extremely annoying about nagging you to create an account, which I don't have any desire to do.
What you said doesn't make much sense. Much more important than the algorithm is the market that the algorithm operates in. Uber couldn't unleash a magical algorithm and solve commuting inefficiencies for every user if there isn't a sufficient density of both riders and drivers (i.e. the main inputs to the algorithm in this case).
That doesn't seem to be a problem for the competition. Prices are the problem, and Uber is trying really hard to lower the prices and profit, that's why the algorithm IS most important.
I really do not understand why almost everyone thinks that "network effect" is the best thing Uber has, when it obviously isn't.
It is. I get an uber where I live within 2-3 minutes. And sometimes I've gotten uberPool matches essentially going to the same destination picked up within a block. These are only achievable with considerable penetration into a local market.
I was an early subscriber given how cheap it was, but I often struggled to find a bike that worked.