Something that drives me nuts about Google Maps is how much of it leads you to non-spatial lists of data. We are spatial beings asking spatial questions. Don't make me do the work of linking a list of restaurants to dots on the map. This is a significant cartographic challenge but I think it's key to making map software a joy to use.
I don't have an iOS device so I can't comment on current state, but I hope this gets first class attention.
That is a very jarring experience. I'd much rather get the pins and have to click to see what they are rather than losing half my screen to the list.
Another problem is that it loves to move your viewport -- sometimes just a small zoom out or something, but sometimes moving you entirely, or searching around your current location instead of in the selected map area. I would prefer it if every viewport move had a prompt saying "Hey, I'm going to move your map to some other area" and give me a chance to complain, or have some sort of seamless "save this view" thing that goes into a stack in the corner so I can go back to the view that I was looking at.
I'm amazed at how long this particular behavior has persisted...how often does someone search for a local business 5000+ miles away without being explicit about it (ie moving the map to that far off area, or putting it in the search query itself).
Agreed, the amount of times it defaults to finding something a thousand miles away is significantly more infuriating than the rarer case when I want to specifically do that.
If its a fairly fresh app launch, default to around me
Every time I try to search for Asian, I get sent to Asia while my location is in the US. I have no idea how anyone would find that sort of "typo" correction and redirection halfway around the world useful.
1. I'm perfectly fine with "Asia" redirecting me to the continent, which is generally expected behavior. I don't understand why a word that clearly means something distinct needs to redirect there as well.
2. The lack of consistency is especially annoying. "Italian" redirects to Italian restaurants in my area, and the same goes for "Chinese", etc.
I was in NYC 2 weeks ago (live in Miami). If I search for "Walgreens" the first 2 autocomplete suggestions are still locations in Brooklyn, and the third is the general text search for "walgreens". Options 4, 5 and etc onwards are local stores, but also not sorted by distance.
Critically, that option only appears after Maps hijacks your view to wherever it pleases. The same applies to other filters too, such as "open now."
I'm stil amazed how hard Maps makes it to view a street name. I can fill my screen with a street and nothing else, and I still won't see its name. I feel like they actually do it on purpose to breed dependence on Maps for navigation references.
> I'm stil amazed how hard Maps makes it to view a street name.
This is one of the reasons I prefer Apple Maps to Google's -- because IMO they do a slightly better job of that. Still wish it would be better, it's a daily nuisance for me.
Yes, but it doesn't show up until after you've done a search, which means the damage may have already been done.
Suppose you want to find things that match X near some landmark Y. As far as I know, you have two options. One is to search for the string "X near Y" and hope Google parses it correctly. The other is to search for Y, memorize its location on the map, search for X (which has a good chance of moving the map view to some random location), pan and zoom back to Y from memory, and click "search this area". It's a huge pain.
Yup. If the app was map-centric you wouldn't have to ask. Just start showing more markers.
If each query was a layer, you would also have a basic GIS. You could allow the user to start asking spatial questions, such as, "Show me where all the Chinese food restaurants (layer 1) Best Buys (layer 2) are.
"Hmm. I need to go to Best Buy but I'm flexible about food. Let's tap X on the Chinese food layer and search for Poutine restaurants instead."
I think it should be "Yes | No (auto selects in X seconds)".
I think changing from your current plan unless you panicedly (and in my jurisdiction, illegally) press a button to stay the course is just generally bad UI.
Part of this is I just don't trust Google Maps' new route to actually be faster. It seems Google Maps doesn't properly weigh the cost of these items, which leads to it's suggested route usually being slower:
* Crossing bridges during rush hour.
* Making a left turn without a light across 3 lanes of traffic.
* Going down small residential streets that are too narrow to safely drive the speed limit.
* Routes that require turning onto a busy road without a light and the corner having really poor visibility.
Oh yes. I've been a designer for a (locally) competing maps service, and I failed miserably at convincing the PM and devs that we should do quite a lot of work (changes to already established behavior) to make sure we aren't ever moving a map viewport user has set up, and that violating this rule makes people angry.
This was a constant source of frustration when I did a trip to another country last year. Adjusting the viewport when the user doesn't have data is a bad idea because you can't load assets for the new view. Yet, Google Maps did this all the time.
It's a mix. I like having a list I can very quickly scroll through and filter. Clicking places one by one when there's 20 isn't that fun. You can also slide down the list and click on the map once the results appear though.
Apple has the luxury of not needing to shove ads in their mapping application. Google needs to show you a list so they can put ads there or shuffle the priority for a high value advertiser.
Apple Maps also heavily relies on lists because lists work really well on mobile devices (infinite scroll!). And as spatially aware as a few here on here, the majority of people do much better with a list of nearby spots.
Yes. I'd much rather get a list of restaurants within a certain radius -- assuming the list shows me some basic summary information like price, rating, the distance, and whether it's open -- than get a map with a dozen mystery pins I have to tap on one by one:
[tap] Oh, sushi. Not in the mood for that.
[tap] Oh, that's closed.
[tap] Oh, that's too close to the one I already tapped, let me zoom in...
[pinch] [tap] Oh, sushi again.
I'm genuinely surprised at how many people here apparently consider that a better user experience.
> I'm genuinely surprised at how many people here apparently consider that a better user experience.
Or that Google (of all companies!) hasn't rigorously tested this and found that lists work better. They convey so much more information and the whole reason you're using a map is because you don't know where stuff is, so you're going to need all that information.
I'd assume it depends a lot on what you're searching for, and also what mode of transportation you're using.
If you search for something like "McDonalds", you care about which McDonalds is easiest to get to, and you don't really care about anything else.
Even if I'm looking for something more vague like "restaurants", I still usually prefer to see everything laid out on the map, but that's because I usually walk places, so location matters a lot to me.
Something that drives me nuts with maps is when zooming in/out the map often jumps - very quickly - to a region off screen. Seems like an easy fix. Does anyone else experience this?
I've only experienced this on the iPhone X, after iOS 11. It happens in many apps, not just Google Maps, and constantly. For example, pinch-to-zoom in Adobe Lightroom often has it jump to a random place in the image. Since nobody seems to be talking about it (and my friends haven't encountered it) I've suspected it to be some kind of physical fault with the touch screen, or perhaps an interference issue with my screen protector, not necessarily a bug in iOS. But who knows.
I'm a person without disabilities, rather slender fingers and quite some savvy w/ computers and I have difficult time not tapping stuff by mistake, not sloppily fat-thumbing stuff when I didn't even mean tapping anything or accurately tapping smallish things from among many others. I'd rather not deal with trying to not hover random stuff on top of that.
The Blackberry Storm (and Storm 2) made clicking in the screen the "tap" action and tapping (but not clicking) the screen the "hover"-equivalent action.
I really liked the idea (and thought the hardware was pretty good on the Storm 2), but was too unusual on too-unpopular a phone to do much of anything.
I worked on BB Storm. It was created by request from 'the major carrier that didn't get the iPhone contract' as an 'iPhone killer'. It was done with haste, and with specific, ugly requests from 'up on high' and was rolled out too early.
BB never really understood how to do 'experience' - except in things at their core like battery length and keyboards. As nuanced and insightful as they were there ... it's like they considered everything else a joke, or didn't want to go deep.
The whole screen on Storm moved - neat idea - should have never made it out of the lab. Or at least, not in the manner it was. It was possibly ahead of it's time as I could feasibly see Apple doing something like this - the new MacPro trackpads are very, very nice. So subtle.
It doesn’t make perfect sense, though, and (possibly because of that) doesn’t quite act as it now.
With a mouse, the 3 actions
- hover
- click
- double click
form a sequence where each action is an extension of the previous one.
Ideally, the actions triggered by them are extensions of the previous one, too. With the mouse, we have that:
- hover = tell me more, but don’t really do anything
- click = tell me more and select this item
- double click = look, select, and open this item
A big advantage of that is that it allows the interface to be faster. A GUI can react to a click by selecting an item without having to wait whether it will be part of a double-click, for example.
⇒ if we can’t get a real hover, in an ideal world, a softer or shorter finger tap, not a long one would mean “tell me about this”. I doubt we can shoe-horn that into the UI this late in the game, though.
I don't have an iOS device so I can't comment on current state, but I hope this gets first class attention.