Tim Jackson's dashboard

Tim Jackson replied on September 29, 2009 14:18 to the idea "Scroll through suggested titles" in LendAround:

Sorry; my mistake; it's feedback.lendaround.com

Tim Jackson replied on September 29, 2009 11:41 to the idea "Scroll through suggested titles" in LendAround:

Pravin - thanks for commenting. We've moved our user forum to uservoice.lendaround.com, and that's where we'll be responding in future.

Tim Jackson replied on September 02, 2009 13:32 to the question "Other products to lend" in LendAround:

We'd like to do it as quickly as possible, Simon. The issue is that market research shows that far more people have DVDs than have tools and garden equipment, and also those things require a higher percentage of the population to be users so that they're physically close enough to you to be helpful.

We've chosen DVDs so that we've got something that the vast majority of households are interested in. If you can help us build our network on DVDs, we'll try to accelerate garden and tools!

Tim Jackson replied on August 28, 2009 14:39 to the problem "Re direct Problem" in LendAround:

Nick, thanks for letting us know. It was a Symfony upgrade migration issue, and we fixed it earlier today. Please let us know if you have any other problem.

Tim Jackson replied on August 25, 2009 12:34 to the problem "Where did this DVD come from?" in LendAround:

Glad to have sorted this out -- this was a case where a user didn't properly record sending a disc.

Tim Jackson replied on August 24, 2009 12:30 to the question "Interested in joining the team" in LendAround:

Great coincidence: we're looking for an interactive marketing professional right now. Andreas, why not send your resume to marketingjob-gs@lendaround.com? And if anyone else is interested in joining us, please do the same :)

Tim Jackson set one of Tim Jackson's replies as an official response to "url for how-to printed on wrapper" in LendAround

Tim Jackson replied on August 21, 2009 11:40 to the idea "url for how-to printed on wrapper" in LendAround:

That's a great idea.

We need to make the instructions printed on the wrapper itself clearer anyway, so it makes sense to give people a trail of crumbs back to the web page showing how to do it if you can't understand them.

Thanks for telling us -- we'll do it.

Tim Jackson asked a question in Clearleft on August 13, 2009 13:39:

Anyone want UX testing work in US?

We're looking for a user tester in the US who could help us out with occasional work using Silverback. Andy at Clearleft suggested I should post this here.

If you're interested, please shoot me an email. The address is tim and the right hand side is lendaround.com.

Thanks!

Tim Jackson replied on August 10, 2009 17:20 to the question "Who will pay for the delivery?" in LendAround:

Sorry to have been slow in replying to you, Dean.

When you send a disc to a friend, you can drop it off by hand if they're close by, which will make it free. Or you can send it by mail in our downloadable wrapper, which will cost 44 cents.

If you don't have friends in Facebook, you are welcome to invite other people by email -- to do this, follow the Invite friends link once you've logged in.

When you're sharing movies with friends, we leave it to you to decide whether they're trustworthy or not. Before agreeing to lend, you can easily see by looking at your friends' profiles how many movies they've borrowed and if they've ever failed to return one.

Do you feel there's more we can do on that? Let us know.

Tim Jackson replied on July 20, 2009 19:29 to the problem "sender state name email" in LendAround:

This is our fault; it's to do with a variable on our US site that shouldn't show up when you use the service.

We'll fix it. Thanks for letting us know.

Tim Jackson replied on July 20, 2009 19:27 to the idea "DVD vs VHS designation?" in LendAround:

At present, we don't have functionality for listing or sharing VHS movies. That's partly because sending a tape through the mail is a big deal, while sending a DVD costs only 44 cents and can be done using our easily downloadable wrapper.

Not many people we know have asked about VHS. How many friends of yours do you think would want to share tapes rather than discs?

Tim Jackson replied on July 20, 2009 19:25 to the idea "membership-based DVD-sharing groups" in LendAround:

That's a great idea. Can we suggest a way for you to test how much people you know would be likely to adopt it?

You can invite some friends using the tools on the web site right now, and in your invitation you can explain what your 'rules' are going to be in terms of what people have to commit to in order to belong. When the people who agree to your rules accept your friendship, you can then circulate a list of them so they can befriend each other.

This would give you a real sense of whether people want to do this. If they do, we can start thinking about how to build it...

Tim Jackson replied on July 20, 2009 19:22 to the idea "Regional functionality requested" in LendAround:

This sounds like a great idea. Can you advise us on an important issue about implementation? When the service is limited to friends only, all our users understand clearly that it's up to them to decide whether they trust another person enough to lend them their stuff.

Creating subdomains for islands or other groups of people may encourage people to lend to others who are local to them, but who turn out not to be trustworthy. How can we make these kinds of local groups possible without creating unrealistic expectations in people's minds about the behavior of others that they don't know, which could then rebound on the service as a whole?

Tim Jackson replied on July 20, 2009 19:10 to the question "list of all available DVD's to borrow?" in LendAround:

Thanks for asking. You can find the list of all the DVDs available to you for borrowing by clicking on the Browse DVDs link on the left of your navigation bar.

Tim Jackson replied on July 17, 2009 20:26 to the problem "Wrong or missing bar codes" in LendAround:

Thanks for letting us know. We'll try to diagnose this problem.

Tim Jackson replied on July 09, 2009 16:36 to the problem "confirmation email - time to arrive?" in LendAround:

Dave, we're sorry to have taken so long to reply to this message -- we thought it had been dealt with the day you posted it, but we were wrong.

Three hours is way too long. Some of our hotmail users have found that their confirmation simply wasn't delivered. If you have another email address you can use, then try that.

The reason that we need to confirm your email is that the service can't work well for you if you're unable to receive emails. For instance, we send you a notification when a disc is on its way to you, or when one of your friends is asking to borrow from you. If that mail can't get to you, things go wrong...

Tim Jackson set one of Tim Jackson's replies as an official response to "Wrong or missing bar codes" in LendAround

Tim Jackson replied on July 09, 2009 16:32 to the problem "Wrong or missing bar codes" in LendAround:

We're sorry you've had this problem, Bryan.
It's lkely to be a problem inside the external DVD database that we use, but we'll troubleshoot it.

Meanwhile, most of those movies should be easy to enter by simply typing in the movie title into our Add DVDs page.

Let us know if that doesn't work, and we'll try to help.

Tim Jackson replied on June 30, 2009 12:34 to the idea "Lending out Box Sets" in LendAround:

Thanks for the suggestion, Caroline.

Many of our users have said that they're don't actually want to lend out the entire boxed set at once -- so they didn't want us to make it too easy for one of their friends to demand it in a single click. They've also told us that they like the idea that one boxed set can make half a dozen people happy at the same time.

To see the way this works, imagine your friends Abel, Brad, Charlie and Dave want to watch your boxed set. If you send disc 1 to Abel, and Brad then requests it, our software can tell Abel to pass it on directly to Brad while disc 2 is making its way to Abel. By the time Abel's on disc 4, disc 1 is being enjoyed by Dave.

Also remember that if discs go by mail, then sending just one disc is super-straightforward, with a single 44-cent stamp and a paper wrapper. Sending the boxed set is a big deal down at the post office.

However, we can still see situations where you'd want to lend the whole boxed set out in one go. How would you like to see it implemented so that you can do this but without making borrowers a bit lazy?

We'd value your thoughts.