What changes would you make to Google Maps, with a basic set of assumptions? (let's say, you can't dramatically increase the cost, you can't hurt Google revenue sources, and you have a team of ~20 engineers to work on the changes).
I'd change it back to the way it was prior to the redesigns.
It used to work fine. The big problem with the current version is the almost complete absence of legible affordances.
There are all kinds of buttons with logos on them that do stuff. But until you learn what they do, their functions are mysterious.
Basic things like Traffic used to be obvious, one-click features. Now they're hidden in the burger menu, so at best they're two clicks away, and at worst a non-trivial percentage of users has no idea they exist. (Etc.)
I second all of the above. For me, though, the major regression is the priorities of the search field. Prior to the redesign Maps seemed to know the exact location I needed regardless of the amount of detail I included in the query (i.e. tossing in the name of an intersection without street/ave/blvd info). Now, I seem to need to almost always include exact details (zip, precise USPS-blessed street address) for it to find what I'm looking for.
Not all the time, but enough of a difference that it feels seriously hindered post redesign.
Sticking the UI over top of the map really is silly. The 10 pixels of map I can still see between the search box and the border of the screen are completely useless, but make the page considerably noisier (more edges/transitions).
I too enjoyed the side bar. It's mysterious but it made me feel like there was more real estate. The map wasn't covered with boxes, whereas in the new design the 40% left handside of the map is unusable. Also, when searching a place, it resets the zoom, it zooms until I see the inside of that place (such as, the city center), whereas I generally want to see where the city is located with a bit more context. Same for a path: it puts the origin and destination on the viewport edges, whereas I generally want to locate the route, therefore see slightly more context. Slightly enough that it's painful.
I have no idea how to switch between satellite and map view. I have no idea where to look for that option - or if that option exists. There's a burger menu, so I tap that. There's a list of options. Satellite is in that list, and is highlighted. The option I want, and I don't know what it's called, doesn't appear to be in that list of menu items. I tap the map to collapse the burger menu. I hold the screen then release. A pin is dropped. I don't think I want a pin, but I have no idea how I dismiss the pin. When the pin is placed a small thing pops up at the bottom of the window. None of that looks relevant. I, completely accidentally, pull it, and a bit more appears. None of that is relevant either (but now I've accidentally discovered how to get street view). I pull it again because something happened the first time and yet more stuff appears, but nothing relevant. I realise that it can't be this hard, so I go back to the burger menu and unintuitively click "satellite". I don't want satellite, and this menu item is already highlighted, and it never occurs to me that someone would put a toggleable item in a list of menu entries without any indication that it's a toggle. But bamn there it is.
So, how would I change Maps? Just put a few more affordances in there. Maybe watch how people unfamiliar with the app try to do stuff.
There are lots of things I like about maps. There's some churn in businesses on my street and maps always seems happy to change info.
In the past there was a ton of research into user interaction with UI. Obviously loads of that fails on mobile, but Google is a smart data driven company that could create a new body of work for mobile.
I know you're making a bigger point, but just in case you are still wondering: have you tried to touch the highlighted satellite option again to unhighlight it? Some of the items in that menu enable and disable layers. Satellite is one such layer. Keep in mind that some of the layers are mutually exclusive, so you can't have public transport layer and traffic layer, which probably makes sense as it avoids cluttering by layers which are rarely needed simultaneously. This was confusing to me until I got a hang of it. This has been the case on Android for a while, but I have never tried the iOS app, so its behavior may be different. Besides that, I get your pain about pins being dropped whenever the map is touched (or clicked on desktop) to get rid of drop-downs and menus.
I hate the dynamic dialog underneath the map search box that automatically shrinks and expands in and out with various location information on it. It seems to always close when I want to look at it, and expand to cover the area of interest when I don't care about the info. A user has to spend some time trying to figure out the rules when the dialog expands or contracts or fight the logic... I would much rather prefer maps take a dedicated portion of screen for that info, and let me show or hide it explicitly.
This is a huge pet peeve. Things growing and shrinking as you click on them. The link is in one place when my brain tells my finger to click but by the time the mouse button is depressed the link has moved somewhere else.
I guess it's just the sacrifice we make for a cool looking web page.
1. Ensure you can enter two addresses into the search delimited by " to " and it be able to correctly split into directions, as you would expect. I tend to expect this to work and it took maps messing this up several times on different occasions to burn it into my head to put the destination address in the search, then click on directions, then enter my starting address.
2. If I type in "from (address)" and search it should show my address in the top of the directions from/to and focus on the "to" field. This is really broken currently, because it always seems to think I want directions to somewhere instead of from. Similarly, if I type in "to (address)" it should open directions and place the address in the correct field.
3. Sometimes the "near me" feature doesn't work. Try it with all sorts of things like "bathroom near me" and see how well it works.
Speaking of mass transportation, it'd be great if Alphabet could spend some money and effort on that. It makes much more sense from a business point-of-view than Google cars do- how much more R&D money is going to be sunk on that before all is said and done? Will it be worth it? Electric cars have to get their energy from somewhere, and everyone having their own car takes a toll on the environment. I understand it's a big place, but if you have the money to roll out fiber and wifi everywhere, you can buy buses, which are much cheaper.
Does GMaps use WebGL? I remember a brief moment in time during some WebGL beta when everything worked incredibly smoothly: scrolling, zooming, you name it. Personally, my main frustration with GMaps is the lagginess, as well as the fact that it looks interactive while it's loading the initial tiles, but is in fact just a series of still images.
- Stop forcing users to sign into google maps mobile just to save their home/work directions. They took that option away and it's infuriating to old farts like me that I will _deliberately have a worse experience_ just so I don't have to sign in
- Stop hijacking basic user interactions like the mouse click. On desktop, if you click the map it will reverse geocode where you clicked (and show you the nearest road to it.) Although I understand the utility of such a feature, I have never ever wanted that. I live in NYC and no one has a car. I just want to change focus off of the constantly expanding and moving navigation window thing. I search for something, then click the background, and now my search is gone. Then I click the location area to get my search back, and nothing happens. I click the background to get rid of the stupid useless direction window, and now everything is gone. Oh, except the thing I clicked is now reverse geocoded for me. Infuriating.
- I challenge people to do the following on desktop: share a location in the middle of a park (hint: drop a pin first)
I (and all my friends) switched to here.com maps after Google has horribly old (2005) data, has a horrible UI, and is generally unusable. In many cities in my region whole districts are completely missing from the maps[1], MapMaker is not available, and in general it’s just a huge mess.
Even worse: It loads so slowly (compared to here.com or bing.com or openstreetmap.org) that sometimes it takes several minutes to load an area while competitors load instantly.
And then there are cities where Google tried to add the new 3D buildings, but the result is so horrible that the satellite view is not usable anymore, for example Vienna [2]
- Allow the user to turn of 3D buildings. They are annoying, kill loading times, and are buggy and just a mess of polygons that looks more like abstract art than buildings.
- Use recent satellite imagery. When Bing and Here maps have images that are 10 (!) years newer than what Google uses, it’s just inacceptable
- Stop having a UI where everything changes while people click on it – Google’s own guidelines say that you should keep stuff predictable. Especially due to the slow loading times people often try to click somewhere, while they try to click some box moves, and they click something completely different. This is extremely frustrating, I’d even begin to call it clickjacking.
See? That’s one of the largest issues. Totally useless UI, no one finds any option. Thanks, btw, but that still doesn’t fix the satellite imagery from 2005 or the obscenely slow loading times (and extreme performance issues, Google maps is just soooo slow).
I, and everyone I know now switched to here, and we’ll probably stick with that for the next years.
It's mostly functionality that was available in earlier versions, but I cannot find it anymore (or is it gone?):
- goo.gl-Link to this map
- Terrain-mode
- collapse white search box w/o loosing all entered data
- enter 'from:xxx to:yyy' for navigation
- extra stops (routing)
The best thing about maps that I really love (and why I am willing to fight with the UI) is the address recognition: I can put almost anything into the search box and it will find the address I had in mind. No street/city separation, no extra box for businesses, no strict order of name, address, zip code, city. And if it's unclear to maps, the suggestions almost always include what I had in mind.
- goo.gl-Link to this map: burger menu, share, short link
- extra stops: once you've set up a basic route, a little plus appears under neath the red target marker in the dialog box, however, this does not seem to work with public transport routing
No idea about the other ones. Personally, I'm slightly miffed about the fact at some point the keywords "home" and "work" stopped working, or that Gmaps sometimes accepts English words in the search query (as in 'X to Y'), but sometimes only German words ('X nach Y'), despite my OS and browser language set to English.
"Home" seems to be ok but "home" just gives me Home Depot results. Though if it's a Thursday or for some reason cloudier than normal "Home" will also give me Home Depot results.
* Disable that "feature" which rotates the map to show directions based on which way I'm facing. Why? Because a) I know my directions and b) GPS is frequently OFF and it rotates all screwy.
* Remember which city I'm in and index search results FIRST against my historical results and SECOND against local results and LASTLY against the world database at large. It's very frustrating re-opening google maps app, tying in something I queried for 10 minutes before and it starts auto-completing to somewhere across an ocean or two.
No more attempting to make things 3D when you zoom in. Way way too slow.
Scroll wheel should zoom in instantly (go to maps.bing.com for how to do this a little better, though to be fair to everyone Bing did take a step towards Google in the last ~month with their maps update and it is much slower. It used to be open as soon as you hit enter in the address bar)
Generally the maps could label streets more frequently. Far too often I'm confused about what street I'm looking at because the label is somewhere off screen.
b. On Android, add a menu option to download maps - "OK MAPS" is not obvious, easy to remember or in any way sensible in the slightest.
c. Make 3D mode work smoothly on an Android tablet. I have the LTE version of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition and it is jerky, stuttery and slow in 3D mode. Compared to Apple maps on the base model iPad3 next to it, it is poor indeed.
I've never, ever used Google maps on a computer and had it work well. It's always at least a little laggy/slow even on a 60Mbps connection on a nice laptop.
