Yes, it's bad, and yet another example of a very public, beloved and well used service by Google being "improved" away by some PM to get that promotion, thereby making it worse, with no option for a user to even revert back to the old design (lest they challenge the SV-career man's assumptions that 'It's better this way!')
Google is by and far the bigget culprit at this tactic, and it's getting very, very tired. I hope the team responsible for this change reads this: You made one of your best products harder and more inefficient to use.
I agree the new design is awful. Admittedly I was used to the old scheme. But to me the new one feels worse. As the article suggests water and parks blend together. Now to much stuff blend together. I also use the topo overlay and it had some sort of weird banding to it that makes it hard to look at. Definitely feels like a step backwards
Having worked on Maps myself (as well as other stuff at Google): you're exactly right. It's make-work. Fixing things that aren't broken, so the PM, UX, and Eng leads can say they did something and get promoted.
To be fair, the same process has been underway on MS Word and Excel for 30 years now. Simple things (like designating the top row of the spreadsheet to be a non-scrolling header) should be simple, and they're not anymore.
It's not complicated, it's right where it should be, it just has a label that somehow manages to be both highly correct in a technical sense and completely unintuitive to anyone who doesn't already know what it's called.
It's not only that, but also the way the ribbon UI resizes when things don't fit on screen all at once. You never know, if there are functionality that's missing from view.
Maps is not run by a man (except philosophically speaking). Perhaps the contrast was adjusted because of the emergence of P3, XDR, OLED, Liquid Retina, etc. Trust me, Google is very lucky to have her magic. ;)
I wonder if having even the lesser used stuff like restaurants, gas stations etc. on the main screen has to do with people using the maps app directly while driving instead of android auto. Burying those in the app might not be wise.
Yikes, I did not realize how bad it’s gotten. You would think someone would have decided against the pallete change, but I guess not. Looks like they’re being beat by apple ux wise for maps right now.
People don't use Maps for navigation alone as of now. I use those overlays a lot on a day to day basis and burying them under some gesture is a terrible suggestion. The product has evolved a lot since 2007 because user needs have changed towards discovery. Also as an outsider we do not have all the UX research that goes into a product and this is reflected in design suggestion changes made related to a lot of products.
yeah, an update I think about 2 years ago created zoom levels where some highways appear disconnected because the connections stop rendering too early.
Changing the default color to teal was a huge mistake IMHO. I have been using Google Maps since its inception (18 years!) and this was a most unwelcome change. They could have at least gave us an option on which color scheme we want. Where’s Steve Jobs when you need him?
You jest but it's 100% doable. If I had a spare couple of months I'd build a UI for this on openstreetmap.org.
(How you'd do it: move osm.org to vector tiles, use Maplibre GL as the rendering library, enable users to upload and select their own JSON stylesheet, build some sort of rudimentary sharing facility so you could use others' stylesheets)
Why does it feel like precious few UXs are meaningfully configurable? I see endless discussions at work on how we should tweak UI details, and every time I mention "why don't we just let the user decide" I get unanimously shouted out of the room. What am I missing? Is it that much more work? Is a consistent theme/brand-feel that much more valuable to the business?
adding configurability means maintaining lots of different possible states, which may interact with each other and have unexpected emergent effects. This slows down future development and attracts users who lose their minds when you break their pet feature.
Some software has succeeded going down the path of high-configurability (mostly FOSS like vim/emacs/sublime/vscode, Calibre, rainmeter), but the prevailing school of thought nowadays is more Apple-esque: you should design software that has one "right" way to do things and adjust that one happy path based on user telemetry. Everyone who doesn't like your One True UX will come around if your software's value proposition is good enough (or at least grit their teeth and keep using it), so it's not worth the effort to create and maintain a bunch of configuration.
Having a "right" way to do things also makes it easier to maintain design which meaningfully guides user behaviour. The interaction between design and user experience is quite complicated, and multiplicatively so with >1 UI options.
Ugh, I hate those overlays. I remember when user testing was going on. My comments were ignored. Make the map a totally separate element that can be primary. Everything else is slow nonsense.
Stupid question: but how do you search for something along a specific route? The search nearby thing never quite works for me, it keeps zooming out / clearing, I never got the hang of it.
For me (on android) it works by selecting a route, and then while you are in the overview, click on the 3 dots on the top right and in the dropdown you can select "search along the route"
I personally find these examples much more practical and easier on the eyes. Traffic lights and roundabouts are marked. Main roads have bold edges, ALL ROADS ARE LABELLED.. Street numbers are shown at regular intervals!
They are a bit too cluttered. Its like "find Waldo" all over the map. These make sense at a high-zoom level where you are trying to find a specific house, or something within a few block radius, but not at a higher zoom level.
Something else I don’t love from looking at my neighborhood is that Aldi gets its own pin/emphasis. Not the important municipal buildings, parks or school.
Her most basic point about the water and parks says it all. There’s a lot of existing visual language around this stuff that could be drawn from. Things going back hundreds of years. But I guess a fucking pin for Aldi speaks volumes about where the real priority is for this „product”.
For whom? Aldi who is highlighted? Google who is paid? Or the poor suckers trying to find something?
A subtle dark pattern that Google uses is that they have roughly one size of POI, so there isn't enough space to show everything, or most things, it has to pick and choose. That artificial scarcity is tied to the profit motive (pay for prominence) and is user hostile.
Sure, grocery stores are most common, but often you're looking for something else. Using small icons, smaller text, or some other UI affordance to facilitate finding what you need nearby, quickly and without text searching, would be great, but isn't in Google's interest.
I think this opinion is unnecessarily cynical. The people who navigate to school tend to have one or two school per year. They learn the route by heart mostly. Schools are not interchangeable for the one attending them. On the other hand, I don't keep track of grocery stores, and I'm much more likely to look for them on a map (especially to plan where to stop by along the road). There are more likely explanations here than to immediately jumping to the cynical interpretation.
Next to the Aldi there is a large grocery marketplace/bazaar that’s far more crowded - that isn’t marked with a pin at all.
Point being - Aldi is paying for this service. The map is skewering reality.
It’s not about historical representation, it’s about the fact that map-making has been around for awhile, and there are some great existing techniques for presenting that information that could be drawn on. But no, let’s melt colors together and highlight corporate chain stores with pins.
Likewise here - as you zoom in, the default pins show this tiny bakery before the huge grocery store everyone uses. The grocery story shows up at the same time as a really random set of apartment buildings.
Perhaps more people actually search for the Aldi because they're passing through and don't know or remember where it is, or because they're looking for operating hours and other information. Most people go to the same schools & parks, nearest their homes, on a regular (daily/weekly) basis, so they don't need directions.
Nah, they do their little dirty tricks all the time.
For example they decide which hotels/restaurants to show in an area when you search. They won't show all of the nearby ones. They might show one that is 5km away and not one that is 100m away.
Once I was in a restaurant that was not in maps. I decided to add it to the map when I was home.
Turned out the place was in their database, but they just decided to NOT show it, even at maximum zoom level over it. But when I added it, they asked if it wasn't that other one that already existed.
> Turned out the place was in their database, but they just decided to NOT show it, even at maximum zoom level over it.
I have the same problem with my barber shop of all places. Even though I've been there probably a hundred times maps never shows it no matter the zoom level, I have to search it by name to find it.
My cynical view is they once said no to a promo offer for ads and are now punished for it.
> My cynical view is they once said no to a promo offer for ads and are now punished for it.
This is my suspicion as well. In the end it is very dangerous to let google decide which venues get business and which get hidden completely. Eventually paying google maps becomes akin to protection racket.
> But when I added it, they asked if it wasn't that other one that already existed
Is it possible that Google legitimately thought there was only one business at that location?
edit: to be fair I just tried searching openstreetmap for "flowers" in a small town I'm familiar with and the results were bad. It zoomed into a two block area with a single flower shop even though many others exist outside of that area. Even in that zoomed in area I could barely see the flower shop on the map because there is no label/pin.
At least it's a real store getting a pin. When I open up Google maps I get a screen full of "Bob's Custom Homes", "Linda's Chocolate Tasting", "Ted's Towing", "Local Auto Detail" all pointing to residential houses in a very residential neighborhood.
Google maps have been terrible for years. (The actual map part and UX interactions.) Lack of detail is astonishing. At this point it's just a glorified car navigation, where the road is everything, and anything else is just for show/illustration/gray/green blur, I suppose. (I don't drive.) Green color means absolutely nothing useful. It can be a forrest, field, or a pretty much anything.
UX consists of annoying forced zooming around during menu/UI navigation. I often just want to exit a search context, but not change the map zoom position, and select something else on the map. I constantly struggle to keep context, when this auto-zoom/sift happens. I mean if there was some checkbox to decouple menu navigation from map control, that would improve the experience 7fold. Show me a fucking arrow on the screen edge if the POI is out of the viewport, but don't shift the map to a supposed "better view".
I have quite a bit of pent up rage towards this stupid app, that I sometimes have to use because local public transport relies on it. UX right out of hell.
These changes don't even register for me as significant degradation of UX.
Their wider strategy was pretty strange too. I especially boggled at how they bought Zagat to help with trusted restaurant reviews, ran it into the ground, then sold it again.
Checking my memory on Wikipedia, I just learned that they did exactly the same to Frommer’s! Although in that case it was less than a year before the Frommer family bought the name back.
> UX consists of annoying forced zooming around during menu/UI navigation.
This is extremely irritating. The fact that turning your phone sideways and then back doesn’t take you back to your original position is just amateur hour. The fact that turning it sideways doesn’t keep the map centered is amateur hour.
Personally I’d like to see an option to just turn off auto zoom entirely except as a result of an explicit search. Google maps _always_ gets it wrong. I am zoomed in on an area and click that I want to start a walking trip and it zooms out and shows the whole city. I mean seriously is anyone an Google actually testing their product? I understand that it’s not actually a map app and instead an app meant for car navigation and advertisement of POI, but seriously just allow some options to override things like auto zoom or an option to actually display road names densely, and they’d have an actual map app again.
> UX consists of annoying forced zooming around during menu/UI navigation
This drives me bonkers and nobody is talking about it.
You plot a public transit route and see something along the way. You click on the marker and nothing happens because there's a route active. You hit back a few times and your map pans wildly around, losing whatever you wanted to see.
I don't mind the widgets, but agree on the colors. The water being teal and non-built areas being mint looks both unnatural and has worse contrast, at least to my eye. It's like they wanted to go for a pastel theme but didn't dare go all the way.
At least there's always the 3D globe/satellite view, which I still think is a marvel. Especially if you're looking up walking directions to somewhere unfamiliar, since you can rotate around and see all nearby buildings, landmarks, etc. hope they expand the coverage!
Less a criticism of the map itself and more of the product, Google Maps overall keeps getting less and less usable.
On iOS it’s possible to tap down into several layers of menus and options to where it becomes impossible to get back out. (For example restaurant -> suggested places -> restaurant -> review) From the lack of well designed navigation it’s clear that the app is a messy collection of UXs thrown on top
of each other.
Don’t even get me started on the desktop browser UI where there seem to be competing google place and google map place products.
Or there's the zooming. It's always zooming in or out in a really inconvenient way. The worst is when you search, they zoom you out 10x, just so they can show you more results, but I don't want results from 100's of kms away.
Here's an idea: don't zoom! Us users are grown up enough to zoom for ourselves.
Result: Zoom out, show 10 places with ratings starting from 1.5, among them a nail shop and a government building. If I'm lucky, it will also show the 4.7 star pizza place 2 blocks away, for which I needed directions.
Funny thing is, sometimes Maps will zoom right in. The classic is when I'm looking for something obscure near my island off the Croatian coast, and it'll zoom right in to a match... in suburban Bratislava. It's almost like it's hoping I won't notice where it's gone.
The "enhancements" are reminding me of when Evernote went from their original UI to a new one, making everything take at least 3-5x more effort/tapping/clicking and I just gave up on it entirely.
I have no trouble distinguishing between land and water, including greenspace. Train lines are much easier to see. Roads have been better broken down and are easier to understand for a pedestrian. The lessened contrast between different types of terrain makes it easier to tell how to get to locations and where locations are. They pop out more. The functional requirements for maps are discovery and navigation, both of which seem improved in this ui update.
Am I the only one who is upset about this ”replace every button with obscure icon without label” trend? Seems that Google and Facebook are the main culprits of this. Every year it gets more disgusting when I unwillingly have to use their services.
I prefer it. Why waste screen space on words? Icons are easier to see and use less space.
The only time you need the word is the one time when you don't yet know what it does. I would much prefer to RTFM one time then save that screen space.
In my favourite UIs I don't have any buttons on screen at all, but I do have an array of buttons on my desk (all labelled with letters, but their functions change depending on context). That's not really possible with a portable device, though.
I haven’t used Google Maps in probably four or five years. Apple Maps doesn’t track me, Google does. And if I can navigate the maze of obscure privacy settings across my Google account, I still don’t trust myself to have done it correctly or Google to respect setting. Apple Maps is sufficient for my driving needs, and is more accurate and provides better routes than Tesla’s infotainment option.
On a side note, I haven’t found an easy way to use Google search logged out, but have a Gmail tab open. After months of irritation, I signed up for Kagi once they lowered the price for unlimited searches, and haven’t looked back. My personal and business Gmail accounts are my only Google ties (plus YouTube for the kids), and honestly I feel more secure this way.
How do you get it to stay logged in or the Kagi token to persist? It stays on mobile but every freaking time i use it with their browser (Orion, which is objectively sweet) on Mac, it wants me to relog in on Kagi.com or whatevs
Interestingly, Gmail seems to be the easiest major Google product to replace with an alternative, particularly if you’re willing to drop a few bucks a year.
I find the contrast of the colors is much better when driving now. Things seem more bright/neon in a way and things actually seem to blend less for me. I was pleasantly surprised by the update.
I don't hate the colours and they're now closer to real street maps. This is of course a subjective opinion as I haven't put the new colours into use to see if the desaturated scheme is more glanceable.
In this example the bright blue route (matching the directional arrow) is actually the optional path, the true path is the softer blue colour (as signalled by the turning direction at the top of the screen.)
Yeah, I find the new colors (and fonts!) a massive improvement in readability, especially while driving. It's so much easier to get situational awareness, recognize crossings, road exists and important landmarks.
But I did share the opinion of author and whined about it like a good HNer when I've only seen the blog post and before I actually tried it.
I worked at a mapping sw company (not Google Maps, but a 3p competitor) and the designers hated street name labels. I think they thought street names uglied up their carefully beautified cartography. Every time there was a conflict between a street label and say a POI icon, they wanted the algorithm to choose the icon. The PM also favored POIs, especially if the icon was $ponsored and brought in revenue.
All the map apps seem to be bad this way. Use Apple Maps and pick a spot with a lot of businesses like the Las Vegas strip. You’re not going to see too many street names winning the algorithmic decision of what to display.
Maps has been pretty transparent over the years of transforming Maps into a destionation for Places, not just to browse, or look around, or sightsee. You open maps, find a Place, and go to it.
> I worked at a mapping sw company (not Google Maps, but a 3p competitor) and the designers hated street name labels. I think they thought street names uglied up their carefully beautified cartography.
Why the hell don’t they just expose an option “show as many street names as possible”?
> the designers hated street name labels. I think they thought street names uglied up their carefully beautified cartography.
This is the part where they should be reminded they're designing a product that should be useful, not a work of art. Label-less street names are fine on posters or those metal-engraving sheets you can hang in your living room and marvel at the grid structure.
> The PM also favored POIs, especially if the icon was $ponsored and brought in revenue.
Oh I see why the designers aren't reminded of the above.
Funnily enough you inspired me to try Apple Maps and it did a better job. The last time I ran into this issue I didn‘t even think about Apple Maps since it’s much worse in the things I use Google Maps for in my location. But now I know where to look up street and river names.
I assume the thinking is as follows: street names mattered on early paper maps, and printouts of online maps, because people would navigate through areas by comparing the street name on the map to the street signs around them. That generation is now aging. Whole new generations have been brought up who instead navigate by searching for a POI or address, and then simply following the line or the voice guidance that the map app creates to lead them to that destination. The latter users may not know or care about the names of all the streets along the way.
Sure, some people want to look at a map with street names just to become familiar with the whole town. But those users are probably too few for a company focused on profit to care about, and such independent-minded users might be harder to monetize anyway.
The problem with that reasoning is that GPS/compasses in phones are often wrong, so it helps to have the spacial awareness to know that you're on the north west corner of Delancey facing north, so you need to turn left to start heading west on Broadway. This is especially true if you're in a dense area where GPS gets especially confused, or if you're trying to catch an Uber (since now there's two potentially faulty GPS's in play).
I often have to zoom in obnoxiously far to read the damn street names. It's quite frustrating and could easily be solved with some sort of tap to display name feature.
I don't particularly like the elision of street names myself, but is GPS on modern phones really often wrong? Perhaps it's more an issue in rural areas or super tightly packed areas like SF or New York? In LA, GPS is kind of crazily accurate, and other than routing choices that can seem strange, it seems to work perfectly.
Compasses on phones are definitely a crapshoot though.
GPS has issues near skyscrapers ("urban canyons") because the signals reflect off buildings and don't arrive at the proper times. You can correct for this with multiple frequencies or if you have an accurate map of nearby building heights.
The only place I’ve had severe gps issues was when visiting NYC. Too many tall buildings. Very little line of sight to a satellite. Plus reflections from buildings. It was frequently off by entire blocks. Found ourselves frequently ignoring the blue dot on the map.
I do encounter compass issues all of the time though. Almost always it starts perpendicular to where it should.
> so it helps to have the spacial awareness to know that you're on the north west corner of Delancey facing north
Most of the people I've questioned on this struggle to figure out where the north west corner is or what direction north is etc. And yet they can still navigate in dense urban environments perfectly fine.
How? Landmark based navigation. All you need to do know is [some big landmark, like central park, or the sea] is behind you. Now to get to your destination, you want store X on your right and move forward. Turn right at store Y, etc. This is the reality of how a lot of people navigate and I think the new map reflects this.
> Landmark based navigation. All you need to do know is [some big landmark, like central park, or the sea] is behind you. Now to get to your destination, you want store X on your right and move forward.
Yes, but one very important and ubiquitous landmark in urban environment is an intersection. Two roads intersecting create an unique point that's easy to find (follow one of the roads until an intersection, then verify by checking street name plates). It's exactly for this reason you'd want a map to always show you street names.
Google Maps doesn't. It also doesn't reliably show most other landmarks you'd care about, like stores or monuments. Google Maps just plain sucks at being a map.
It is, in fact, extraordinarily difficult to format street names well, especially at ever-changing zoom levels. What would it look like if you look at the whole city with "all street names" enabled? If you can't actually show them all, how do you decide what streets to drop? What if there's a small but important street, or a street with a long name that doesn't fit? The edge cases are numerous.
Agreed, we don't need "show all level of details" when that's not tenable. I'd just prefer Google Maps to be a bit more "dense" when deciding what zoom level to show details at. This is particularly a problem with maps locations-- it's far too easy to get the incorrect impression that a building you are looking at is entirely a Denny's when in reality it's a strip mall with 5 businesses if you zoom in a little closer...
Every OSM-based mapping programming I’ve used handles it basically fine. Considering the amount of resources Google has, I find your claim pretty ridiculous. Google is actively choosing to hide street names and actively choosing not to provide an option to override that. This is quite clearly a business decision of some kind. They could certainly do this if they chose to.
Let's start with the simple rule: if a street name is big enough / important enough that Google Maps would consider showing it, it should show it. Always.
Unless you're pulling up to meet someone and need to tell them where you are, or calling 911 and need to tell them where you are. In those situations I want a street name fast and these issues can be quite frustrating.
Or in short: Google Maps isn't a map, it's a turn-by-turn nav that pretends to be a map.
A good digital map is a stellar tool for orientation and discovery. Google Maps isn't, because orientation and discovery goes against pushing you recommendations (read: ads). They don't want you to have spatial awareness - they want you to blindly follow paths that make them money.
Especially in more rural areas, you're often given directions where to go based on things that aren't addresses that Google Maps would understand. Being able to open a good map and ask questions like "is that the one after Midler Avenue?" helps you drop a pin on the map, and then use the new-school navigation.
Also, it used to be that if you search "[street name] map" in Google Search a very helpful Google Maps image appears with the street nicely highlighted. At around the time of the Bard rollout they completely broke this functionality. Now it's returned only in a much inferior form not least because of the lack of street names. Some screenshots for comparison:
That is decidedly not always true. It would be cool if there were some zoom level below which names were always displayed, but there isn’t. Especially in dense PoI places.
Sometimes you can see some street names, but not others. So you have to play this game of constantly zooming in and out in different locations to figure out the names of all the streets.
I came here to complain about the old version often not showing street names, forcing me to scroll a few miles down some streets to see the name. Amazing that they managed to make that worse.
It seems to do a better job at always showing street names if you are zoomed in. I didn‘t even think about using Apple Maps when I ran into this issue but it seems to do a better job at this.
The google maps visual design always lacked contrast to me. I don't feel anything for the new design, but I will definitely not miss the old visual. Weird they waited 15 years before trying to better it.
Yesterday Jonathan Blow was complaining about some Maps app on his Twitter feed, but not sure if it was Google Maps or another product.
I do agree Google Maps can be annoying to use. But other Google products get more annoying to use as time goes on as well. I have huge annoyances with Gmail and Google Calendar. This in context of my iPhone SE (which, I guess, has a "small" screen size, so perhaps related to my issues).
- Every single time I visit the Gmail login page, it always tries to upsell me to use the freaking app, that I don't want to use.
- At least on my phone screen, the button to dismiss the upsell page is covered by other UI elements. Only way to get rid of it, is to refresh the page. Not sure if this is a dark pattern to nudge people towards the app.
- I have multiple Gmail accounts (2 company accounts from different companies, my own company account, a private account and a spam mail account). Sometimes I am logged into one Gmail account and want to see the calendar for another account. It's very hard to use the top right button to switch accounts. Inside web-based calendar app almost impossible.
And an annoyance I have in general these days, with many web-based apps, is the constant security crap to deal with (2FA stuff mainly).
... I long for a simpler web like we had 10-15 years ago ...
Actually, I use the Mail app for a single email account (my own private email). I just don't want to add all company email addresses to the Mail app. This way I have a better separation between work and private stuff. As in: when I check email in the Mail app, I am not confronted with work stuff.
- At least on my phone screen, the button to dismiss the upsell page is covered by other UI elements.
I find this to be incredibly common on so many sites on mobile. Cookie popups or "subscribe to our newsletter" popups where the dismiss button is either missing, hidden or rendered off the bottom of the screen, with no ability to scroll.
I don't get how it ships. Don't the site owners notice a massive increase in vistor bounce rate?
OK, I wasn't going crazy then. I had recently used Google Maps for a road trip that I was planning and I asked my GF if it looks weird. My initial thought was if someone changed my monitor settings. (I use different one for just gaming) . The design and graphics reminds me of Apple Maps a lot(the mac version). The look and feel was slightly off and it felt dullish. Not sure how I can explain it.
The suggestions are definitely good in the post. I like to have a clean maps panel and rest can be hidden away.
The biggest new thing that I’ve noticed that I was waiting for, but they finally did, was put advertisements for places on your route as optional stops
To me, that’s the kind of thing that says this is no longer going to help me actually achieve my goals, and is going to start challenging my ability to make decisions unimpeded
Over the last few years it's been moving away from providing maps. Seems like management only want to provide advertising, and follow-my-directions ... It feels like "do what I tell you and buy what I tell you", not what I want from a map!
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadGoogle is by and far the bigget culprit at this tactic, and it's getting very, very tired. I hope the team responsible for this change reads this: You made one of your best products harder and more inefficient to use.
To be fair, the same process has been underway on MS Word and Excel for 30 years now. Simple things (like designating the top row of the spreadsheet to be a non-scrolling header) should be simple, and they're not anymore.
https://youtu.be/dX3k_QDnzHE
This makes me wonder if Slack hired a bunch of PMs from Google recently.
Nitter: https://nitter.net/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182
(How you'd do it: move osm.org to vector tiles, use Maplibre GL as the rendering library, enable users to upload and select their own JSON stylesheet, build some sort of rudimentary sharing facility so you could use others' stylesheets)
Some software has succeeded going down the path of high-configurability (mostly FOSS like vim/emacs/sublime/vscode, Calibre, rainmeter), but the prevailing school of thought nowadays is more Apple-esque: you should design software that has one "right" way to do things and adjust that one happy path based on user telemetry. Everyone who doesn't like your One True UX will come around if your software's value proposition is good enough (or at least grit their teeth and keep using it), so it's not worth the effort to create and maintain a bunch of configuration.
Turns out OSMAnd still looks better
This is also how a map could look:
https://postimg.cc/fVZvw8qJ
https://www.mapsbookstravelguides.com.au/wp-content/uploads/...
https://www.mapsbookstravelguides.com.au/wp-content/uploads/...
Her most basic point about the water and parks says it all. There’s a lot of existing visual language around this stuff that could be drawn from. Things going back hundreds of years. But I guess a fucking pin for Aldi speaks volumes about where the real priority is for this „product”.
The goal isn’t creating a historical representation of where things were.
It’s supposed to be functional.
For whom? Aldi who is highlighted? Google who is paid? Or the poor suckers trying to find something?
A subtle dark pattern that Google uses is that they have roughly one size of POI, so there isn't enough space to show everything, or most things, it has to pick and choose. That artificial scarcity is tied to the profit motive (pay for prominence) and is user hostile.
Sure, grocery stores are most common, but often you're looking for something else. Using small icons, smaller text, or some other UI affordance to facilitate finding what you need nearby, quickly and without text searching, would be great, but isn't in Google's interest.
How many useful sizes could they have on a phone?
> the profit motive (pay for prominence)
Can you pay for this?
Yes - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9934637?hl=en
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38401345
Point being - Aldi is paying for this service. The map is skewering reality.
It’s not about historical representation, it’s about the fact that map-making has been around for awhile, and there are some great existing techniques for presenting that information that could be drawn on. But no, let’s melt colors together and highlight corporate chain stores with pins.
But it's 100% fine that Google Maps isn't the all-singing all-dancing maps app for everyone. Other maps are available. Plurality is good.
For example they decide which hotels/restaurants to show in an area when you search. They won't show all of the nearby ones. They might show one that is 5km away and not one that is 100m away.
Once I was in a restaurant that was not in maps. I decided to add it to the map when I was home.
Turned out the place was in their database, but they just decided to NOT show it, even at maximum zoom level over it. But when I added it, they asked if it wasn't that other one that already existed.
Moral of the story: use openstreetmaps.
I have the same problem with my barber shop of all places. Even though I've been there probably a hundred times maps never shows it no matter the zoom level, I have to search it by name to find it.
My cynical view is they once said no to a promo offer for ads and are now punished for it.
This is my suspicion as well. In the end it is very dangerous to let google decide which venues get business and which get hidden completely. Eventually paying google maps becomes akin to protection racket.
Is it possible that Google legitimately thought there was only one business at that location?
edit: to be fair I just tried searching openstreetmap for "flowers" in a small town I'm familiar with and the results were bad. It zoomed into a two block area with a single flower shop even though many others exist outside of that area. Even in that zoomed in area I could barely see the flower shop on the map because there is no label/pin.
No such thing exists.
UX consists of annoying forced zooming around during menu/UI navigation. I often just want to exit a search context, but not change the map zoom position, and select something else on the map. I constantly struggle to keep context, when this auto-zoom/sift happens. I mean if there was some checkbox to decouple menu navigation from map control, that would improve the experience 7fold. Show me a fucking arrow on the screen edge if the POI is out of the viewport, but don't shift the map to a supposed "better view".
I have quite a bit of pent up rage towards this stupid app, that I sometimes have to use because local public transport relies on it. UX right out of hell.
These changes don't even register for me as significant degradation of UX.
Checking my memory on Wikipedia, I just learned that they did exactly the same to Frommer’s! Although in that case it was less than a year before the Frommer family bought the name back.
This is extremely irritating. The fact that turning your phone sideways and then back doesn’t take you back to your original position is just amateur hour. The fact that turning it sideways doesn’t keep the map centered is amateur hour.
Personally I’d like to see an option to just turn off auto zoom entirely except as a result of an explicit search. Google maps _always_ gets it wrong. I am zoomed in on an area and click that I want to start a walking trip and it zooms out and shows the whole city. I mean seriously is anyone an Google actually testing their product? I understand that it’s not actually a map app and instead an app meant for car navigation and advertisement of POI, but seriously just allow some options to override things like auto zoom or an option to actually display road names densely, and they’d have an actual map app again.
This drives me bonkers and nobody is talking about it.
You plot a public transit route and see something along the way. You click on the marker and nothing happens because there's a route active. You hit back a few times and your map pans wildly around, losing whatever you wanted to see.
At least there's always the 3D globe/satellite view, which I still think is a marvel. Especially if you're looking up walking directions to somewhere unfamiliar, since you can rotate around and see all nearby buildings, landmarks, etc. hope they expand the coverage!
On iOS it’s possible to tap down into several layers of menus and options to where it becomes impossible to get back out. (For example restaurant -> suggested places -> restaurant -> review) From the lack of well designed navigation it’s clear that the app is a messy collection of UXs thrown on top of each other.
Don’t even get me started on the desktop browser UI where there seem to be competing google place and google map place products.
Here's an idea: don't zoom! Us users are grown up enough to zoom for ourselves.
Result: Zoom out, show 10 places with ratings starting from 1.5, among them a nail shop and a government building. If I'm lucky, it will also show the 4.7 star pizza place 2 blocks away, for which I needed directions.
The "enhancements" are reminding me of when Evernote went from their original UI to a new one, making everything take at least 3-5x more effort/tapping/clicking and I just gave up on it entirely.
I have no trouble distinguishing between land and water, including greenspace. Train lines are much easier to see. Roads have been better broken down and are easier to understand for a pedestrian. The lessened contrast between different types of terrain makes it easier to tell how to get to locations and where locations are. They pop out more. The functional requirements for maps are discovery and navigation, both of which seem improved in this ui update.
The only time you need the word is the one time when you don't yet know what it does. I would much prefer to RTFM one time then save that screen space.
In my favourite UIs I don't have any buttons on screen at all, but I do have an array of buttons on my desk (all labelled with letters, but their functions change depending on context). That's not really possible with a portable device, though.
On a side note, I haven’t found an easy way to use Google search logged out, but have a Gmail tab open. After months of irritation, I signed up for Kagi once they lowered the price for unlimited searches, and haven’t looked back. My personal and business Gmail accounts are my only Google ties (plus YouTube for the kids), and honestly I feel more secure this way.
Firefox container tabs are ideal for this kind of thing
However there are examples of the night mode driving directions having unintuitive colours: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/17yv4qp/...
In this example the bright blue route (matching the directional arrow) is actually the optional path, the true path is the softer blue colour (as signalled by the turning direction at the top of the screen.)
Also I get the feeling that smaller streets disappeared, forcing me to enable the cycling mode.
But I did share the opinion of author and whined about it like a good HNer when I've only seen the blog post and before I actually tried it.
For example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9465831,-2.6376033,18.96z?... shows "Crafting by Steph" in the middle of a road that sees at least 30,000 cars per day. Steph will be hit at 20-50 mph.
Here: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9461045,-2.6390567,42m/dat... There is a business called "Napoca Taxi" listed.
That area is actually a grave yard.
I agree with Elizabeth Laraki - the colours are wrong on G maps
Screenshot: https://i.ibb.co/qszKNSm/google-maps-labels.png
Example URL: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5041929,-0.111821,17.46z
I guess there is no money in it?
Can't Google just show a damned ad when the street is zoomed in far enough to have room for a video and the name?
All the map apps seem to be bad this way. Use Apple Maps and pick a spot with a lot of businesses like the Las Vegas strip. You’re not going to see too many street names winning the algorithmic decision of what to display.
Why the hell don’t they just expose an option “show as many street names as possible”?
This is the part where they should be reminded they're designing a product that should be useful, not a work of art. Label-less street names are fine on posters or those metal-engraving sheets you can hang in your living room and marvel at the grid structure.
> The PM also favored POIs, especially if the icon was $ponsored and brought in revenue.
Oh I see why the designers aren't reminded of the above.
Sure, some people want to look at a map with street names just to become familiar with the whole town. But those users are probably too few for a company focused on profit to care about, and such independent-minded users might be harder to monetize anyway.
I often have to zoom in obnoxiously far to read the damn street names. It's quite frustrating and could easily be solved with some sort of tap to display name feature.
Compasses on phones are definitely a crapshoot though.
I do encounter compass issues all of the time though. Almost always it starts perpendicular to where it should.
Most of the people I've questioned on this struggle to figure out where the north west corner is or what direction north is etc. And yet they can still navigate in dense urban environments perfectly fine.
How? Landmark based navigation. All you need to do know is [some big landmark, like central park, or the sea] is behind you. Now to get to your destination, you want store X on your right and move forward. Turn right at store Y, etc. This is the reality of how a lot of people navigate and I think the new map reflects this.
Yes, but one very important and ubiquitous landmark in urban environment is an intersection. Two roads intersecting create an unique point that's easy to find (follow one of the roads until an intersection, then verify by checking street name plates). It's exactly for this reason you'd want a map to always show you street names.
Google Maps doesn't. It also doesn't reliably show most other landmarks you'd care about, like stores or monuments. Google Maps just plain sucks at being a map.
My spouse can testify, I get furious when I can't see the street names. :)
A good digital map is a stellar tool for orientation and discovery. Google Maps isn't, because orientation and discovery goes against pushing you recommendations (read: ads). They don't want you to have spatial awareness - they want you to blindly follow paths that make them money.
https://imgur.com/a/K4oAbZs
More street names would be good in both versions, but it doesn’t look like that has regressed, at least.
It seems to do a better job at always showing street names if you are zoomed in. I didn‘t even think about using Apple Maps when I ran into this issue but it seems to do a better job at this.
I do agree Google Maps can be annoying to use. But other Google products get more annoying to use as time goes on as well. I have huge annoyances with Gmail and Google Calendar. This in context of my iPhone SE (which, I guess, has a "small" screen size, so perhaps related to my issues).
- Every single time I visit the Gmail login page, it always tries to upsell me to use the freaking app, that I don't want to use.
- At least on my phone screen, the button to dismiss the upsell page is covered by other UI elements. Only way to get rid of it, is to refresh the page. Not sure if this is a dark pattern to nudge people towards the app.
- I have multiple Gmail accounts (2 company accounts from different companies, my own company account, a private account and a spam mail account). Sometimes I am logged into one Gmail account and want to see the calendar for another account. It's very hard to use the top right button to switch accounts. Inside web-based calendar app almost impossible.
And an annoyance I have in general these days, with many web-based apps, is the constant security crap to deal with (2FA stuff mainly).
... I long for a simpler web like we had 10-15 years ago ...
Search on the app uses my phone’s cpu. search on the web site uses their cpu.
Guess which is faster ?
I find this to be incredibly common on so many sites on mobile. Cookie popups or "subscribe to our newsletter" popups where the dismiss button is either missing, hidden or rendered off the bottom of the screen, with no ability to scroll. I don't get how it ships. Don't the site owners notice a massive increase in vistor bounce rate?
The suggestions are definitely good in the post. I like to have a clean maps panel and rest can be hidden away.
To me, that’s the kind of thing that says this is no longer going to help me actually achieve my goals, and is going to start challenging my ability to make decisions unimpeded