Did you even try this?

More and More, I feel like the public at large has become the beta testers for most products. So often I find myself asking "did the manufacturer even test this before they released it?" I understand agile, scrum, and sprints, but it seems like the rush to get a product to market has trumped releasing good products.

The latest case in point happened in San Francisco. We were walking around the pier area and decided to rent electric scooters. My sister's phone was dead, so I offered to rent both on mine. Turns out, you can only rent one scooter at a time.So everyone out on a date, or parents with kids, or friends traveling together are out of luck. I installed apps for four different companies on my phone so I could rent two scooters. Each app used a different payment method, some were quick,  others took forever.
 

Once underway, I see that my battery is just about dead. The light on the dash went from green to red, not exactly easy to understand. How about a gauge of some sort? But OK, I have enough juice to find another scooter. Thing is, once you've rented a scooter, the app no longer shows you available scooters from that company. apparently the companies assume you're going to rent a scooter once in your life and never again? Not a great business model.

I use a different app to find a scooter from a different company and head there. Once I arrive I press the end ride button on the app, and attempt to lock the scooter to the bike rack. However, hitting the end ride button locks the cable lock to the scooter, apparently you have to secure it before you hit the button. that would've been good information to know. I try to re-rent the scooter so I can lock it up to avoid the $50 fine, but the battery is dead so I can't rent it again. Somehow I avoid throwing it into the bay. 
 

The next scooter I attempt to rent has a broken lock and won't release from the rack, Then we could only find the scooters from One company so we couldn't get two scooters to get back to our car. We wound up walking several blocks. 

it's impressive that the software guys came up with an app that can track scooters around the city in real time, but actually providing a service that is useful to people is something different entirely. If the scooters ever come to my city, at least I'll know how to get away with throwing one in the river

It's pretty amazing how close minded a person or company can be when testing a product they designed. We run into it frequently with door manufacturers. Testing millions of cycles in a clean room does not equate to real life. I suggested to the engineer that he set it up in the employee parking lot with all the dirt and traffic and redo the test. The guy looked at me like I had 3 eyes. 

Pretty sure you have better self control than I do.  Chucking scooters for distance sounds tempting based on your experience.

They rolled out a convoluted online program at work a couple of years ago to force supervisors to do an HR task.  I suggested (politely and thoughtfully) that an HR task should be completed by HR.  The HR representative called me every polite word she could think of for "idiot" for even considering such a thing.  Kind of amazing.

"Chucking scooters for distance sounds tempting based on your experience."

I use a spinning shot-put like technique, but if you ride one to the end of a dock you don't have to throw it as far!

They recently implemented a new LMS (learning management system) at work.  There is NO test server.... they just update the system... WITHOUT notifying anyone... 

...needless to say, and update that broke service for 20,000 potential users was not received well!

My recent somewhat related complaint is how everything needs to be an app now. Let me do it through the browser on my phone for chrissakes. I don’t want to download a berkeleying app, set up an account, and enter a loyalty number just to rent a bicycle for 15 minutes. 

These are the risks associated with being an "early adopter" or "lighthouse customer."  Me?  I'll wait until they iron the bugs out in ten or twenty years.

I was told by a trainer that a lot of the Diesel emissions device issues are caused by people leaving the engines at an idle, or putt-putting around.

When they TEST them, they hook up a 20k pound trailer, or 168 hour accelerated-wear dyno programs, or the like.  They don't fire up a truck and leave it in the parking lot idling all day long and then drive it at 20% to the store and back.

I cannot wait for some of these scooter companies to go under- we have Lime here in the rust belt and I've always wondered about how to get their used battery packs for my projects when people break em'.

I also don't understand how anyone bought into their business model. Public eBikes I understand with their station dock they have to be loaded into- and a bike stolen can come back on your card giving you a HELL of an incentive to dock it. But scooters have nothing like that, and people make it a game to toss em' into large bodies of water.

Vc money. 

mtn said:

My recent somewhat related complaint is how everything needs to be an app now. Let me do it through the browser on my phone for chrissakes. I don’t want to download a berkeleying app, set up an account, and enter a loyalty number just to rent a bicycle for 15 minutes. 

You'll still have to do all those things in the browser too. 

I work for a big engineering company that recently bought out some other big engineering companies. 

We have apps coming out the wazoo. 

And each has a different log in method.  Some want my email address. Some want user name. Some want the email address prefix but not the suffix after the @ sign.   Some require 1 login. Some cycle through up to 3 login levels in order to get it going.   

Some are really fun.  A screen of crash messages pops up with all the code that failed.   No one can fix that one.

I'm fairly convinced the project lead was just given a product name by the higherups, who passed it to the workers before picking a budget and timeline out of a hat. Not just with the scooters, but with most things. After other companies found out the videogame industry was getting people to pay for the "privilege" of beta testing, they decided to see how far they could push it. People being people, it got pushed right off a cliff. 

As somebody who repairs a lot of the trash that is sold electronically, I can firsthand tell you that there seems to be a governing mentality among manufacturers today and it is that there is a sucker born every second. All they have to do is put something on the market and say that it does something. They never have to follow through, it doesn't have to do it very well, all it Has to be is affordable for the average dollar store employee. Once they sell enough of them to recoup the cost of creating it, they move onto the next pile of E36 M3. Once the brand has officially tank it's image, it gets dissolved and turned into another new company that repeats the same exact crap. A.k.a. do not buy Samsung or LG appliances