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> It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map. It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-turn directions for people who

> It also doesn't change the fact that Google Maps is very bad at being a map. It's entire UI flow is oriented for giving turn-by-turn directions for people who know where they are and where they are going; As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. Note also that for most smartphone users of Google Maps the use-case is actually much broader than that. The UI flow also totally accounts for users who only know where they are going—thanks to GPS and Google Maps knowing where you are often isn't necessary. I'm confused by the complaint that the "Maps" app only caters to the 90-percentile use case for maps, but doesn't cover the other uses-cases well. > I agree 100% with the author that one of the primary functions of a computer is enabling easy cross-referencing of information. This ability has been degrading over the past decades I just find this not the case at all. For expert-users the tools that existed decades ago are still there and still usable. Or you can craft your own! For non-expert users the information in the world is orders of magnitude more accessible than it used to be.

derefr 7y ago
I think you’re measuring use-cases by volume (i.e. Monthly Active Users) instead of by mass (i.e. number of man-hours spent engaged with the app’s UI by those users.) Certainly, a lot of people use Google Maps for turn-by-turn directions. This means that they interact with the actual UI and visible map tiles once, at the beginning of the trip; and then from there on are given timely voice directions every few minutes, which they can maybe contextualize by looking at the map on the screen. Even if you count the time they spend hearing those directions as time spent “interacting with the UI” of Google Maps, it adds up to fewer man-hours than you’d think. Meanwhile, I believe that there are a much larger number of collective man-hours spent staring at the Google Maps UI—actually poking and prodding at it—by pedestrians navigating unfamiliar cities, or unfamiliar places in their city. Tourists, people with new jobs, people told to meet their friends for dinner somewhere; etc. And the Google Maps UI (especially the map tiles themselves) is horrible for pedestrians. Half the time you can’t even figure out the name of the road/street you’re standing on; names of arterial roads (like main streets that happen to also be technically highways) only show up at low zoom levels, while names of small streets barely show up at the highest zoom level. And asking Maps to give you a pedestrian or public-transit route to a particular place doesn’t fix this, because GMaps just doesn’t understand what can or cannot be walked through. It thinks public parks are solid obstacles (no roads!) while happily routing you along maintenance paths for subway systems, rail lines, and even airfields. (One time it guided me to walk down the side of an above-grade freeway, outside the concrete side-barriers, squeezing between the barriers and a forest.) And, of course, it still assumes the “entrances” to an address are the car entrances—so, for example, it routes pedestrians to the back alleys behind apartment buildings (because that’s more often where the parking-garage entrance is) rather than the front, where the door is. I don’t live here, Google; I can’t even get into the garage! The thing is, these are such distinct workflows that there’s no reason for Google Maps to be optimizing for one use-case over the other in the first place. It’s immediately apparent which one you’re attempting by your actions upon opening the app; so why not just offer one experience (and set of map tiles) for people attempting car navigation, and a different experience (and set of map tiles) for people attempting pedestrian wayfinding? Or, someone could just come out with a wayfinding app for pedestrians that does its own map rendering. There’s already a Transit app with a UI (and map tiles) optimized for transit-takers; why not a Walkthere app with a UI (and map tiles) optimized for pedestrians? :)
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Honestly, the two use cases have an obvious intersection: a planning/wayfinding session in which I want Google to compute me a route that I want to then inspect, perhaps modify, and then save into my planning session.
- dmurray 7y ago
  > Or, someone could just come out with a wayfinding app for pedestrians that does its own map rendering. There’s already a Transit app with a UI (and map tiles) optimized for transit-takers; why not a Walkthere app with a UI (and map tiles) optimized for pedestrians? :) This wouldn't really make me happy. It makes more sense to integrate the walking instructions into the Transit app and be good at giving directions for multimodal transport. I need to know if I should get off the bus here, and walk through the park, or wait till three stops later, which leaves me closer as the crow flies but further away overall. The car app doesn't need to work multimodally since it's not normal to drive somewhere, walk 10 minutes, then drive somewhere else. Google maps is still the best general purpose multimodal transport app I've used, but it could be so much better. I'm in Austria right now and it doesn't know about the Austrian buses. There's an app (OEBB Scotty) from the Austrian rail operator which I assume everyone uses instead.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. There's a very subtle point the Twitter thread was making here. This use case may be most popular not because it's what the people want, but because it's all that they can easily do. The tools you use shape how you work, and what you can work on. FWIW, I learned to pay attention when the machine doesn't help me do what I want (it's a good source of ideas for side projects), so I've noticed that I do want a map that works like a map - something I can explore and annotate. I do sometimes resort to screenshotting GMaps, or photographing paper maps in the past, just to have a map on my phone. I've seen non-tech people do that as well. So I can be confident that it's not just me and the Twitter thread's author that want this. > For expert-users the tools that existed decades ago are still there and still usable. Or you can craft your own! The Twitter thread's point (and mine as well) is that expert users can and do work around this degradation. It's a frustrating chore, but it's not all that difficult if you can code a bit and have some spare time. It's the experience for the non-expert users that has degraded in a way they can't fix for themselves. > For non-expert users the information in the world is orders of magnitude more accessible than it used to be. The way it's accessible, it's almost as if it wasn't. Sure, you can easily Google random trivia. But good luck trying to compare things. That's always a pain, and usually involves hoping that someone else made a dedicated tool for similar comparisons on the topic you're interested in, and that the information hardcoded in that tool are current and accurate. Notably, the tools you use for searching have no support for comparing.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  > It's the experience for the non-expert users that has degraded in a way they can't fix for themselves. Why not?
  - masukomi 7y ago
    because it's not practical to write a Google Maps (or whatever) replacement most of the time? It's a ton of work. Sure we can smooth over rough edges but actually implementing lots of missing non-trivial things? Or, making things faster that rely on some 3rd party back end? Usually either not an option, or not an option without recreating the entire front end.
reaperducer 7y ago
As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. Your sentence starts out like you're stating a fact, but then peters out with "probably." Do you have data on this? I'd posit the opposite: That exploration is far more used in online maps. Aside from Uber drivers, SV types, and wannabe road warrior squinters, nobody uses maps for their daily activities. People know where they're going and they go there without consulting technology. That's why we have traffic jams.
- melq 7y ago
  I think it depends where you are driving. I live in a large city and there are way more people using maps for their daily activities that you might think. In my parents neighborhood in the suburbs, and in rural areas, I think you're probably right. If there are only a few ways to get somewhere, you probably aren't using maps.
- welly 7y ago
  People use maps for daily activities all the time. Not to find where they're trying to get to, but for how to get somewhere more quickly - ie. public transport directions, or if it's quicker to walk than go by bus/train/tram.
- ncallaway 7y ago
  > Your sentence starts out like you're stating a fact, but then peters out with "probably." Fair enough. I'd argue that I put the word probably in the first half of the sentence, so I don't see it as "petering out", but fair enough. I will agree with the critique that I'm making an assumption about mapping use cases, and don't have hard data. I'm happy to be corrected by any real data on the topic.
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  I think this isn't true at all. The vast majority of people I know use maps solely find something like an ATM/gas station/coffee shop/etc and then figuring out how to get there or how long it would take to get there. We don't have data, but the only people that do are Google and they have designed their UX around this use case. And it has become one of the most used tools on Earth. If we are going to play the 'your comment is bad because you don't have data' game, I think the onus is really on you to prove that the company with all the data is getting it wrong.
SubiculumCode 7y ago
Only thing I'd like is for maps to not give directions for the parts that are obvious for you since you'd done that part a million times i.e. from your home, turn right to get to the freeway
megous 7y ago
That's the major usecase for mobile GMaps, because it absolutely sucks for any other usecase, and thus people can't use it for any other purposes really. Except maybe looking up timetables for a previously known public transport stop (only in certain countries, some have much superior ways to plan public transport travel); planning a transport between two stops if you're not standing at one of them right now probably requires a phd. Also if your mapping app is good, the people will use it as little as possible. That's certainly my desire as a turist. So maybe perverse incentives are at play, if wrong usage metrics are used to improve the app. Anyway, I'm used to using paper maps from the childhood, so ergonomics of mobile phone apps is really irritating, because of how paper maps work so much better for me most of the time.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
goph0 7y ago
> As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. Popularity is not a measure of quality. Also, the snarky tone is unnecessary.
mcguire 7y ago
"As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world." ... "I'm confused by the complaint that the "Maps" app only caters to the 90-percentile use case for maps, but doesn't cover the other uses-cases well." Seems like there is an awful lot of room between "probably the most popular use case" and "90-percentile use case", no?
marcosdumay 7y ago
> As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. I don't think fully deciding an entire path was ever the major use of paper maps. But well, now that apps only allow for this usage, I am pretty sure it's the most popular one. Personally, I very rarely use maps this way. What makes Google shit useless for me (worse, actually, because it insists on opening by default, and people now decided they can send a Google marker instead of an address, and Google makes it impossible to retrieve data from a marker). Most people I know, faced with the option of turn by turn directions or nothing choose nothing nearly all the time.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Personally, I never use turn-by-turn even to walk around in unknown places, because it loses context. Instead, I stop at the screen that shows the route options; I don't press "Start" to activate the nav. Besides being more useful when walking around, it doesn't eat such ridiculous amounts of battery power that the turn-by-turn nav does for some reason.

derefr 7y ago

I think you’re measuring use-cases by volume (i.e. Monthly Active Users) instead of by mass (i.e. number of man-hours spent engaged with the app’s UI by those users.) Certainly, a lot of people use Google Maps for turn-by-turn directions. This means that they interact with the actual UI and visible map tiles once, at the beginning of the trip; and then from there on are given timely voice directions every few minutes, which they can maybe contextualize by looking at the map on the screen. Even if you count the time they spend hearing those directions as time spent “interacting with the UI” of Google Maps, it adds up to fewer man-hours than you’d think. Meanwhile, I believe that there are a much larger number of collective man-hours spent staring at the Google Maps UI—actually poking and prodding at it—by pedestrians navigating unfamiliar cities, or unfamiliar places in their city. Tourists, people with new jobs, people told to meet their friends for dinner somewhere; etc. And the Google Maps UI (especially the map tiles themselves) is horrible for pedestrians. Half the time you can’t even figure out the name of the road/street you’re standing on; names of arterial roads (like main streets that happen to also be technically highways) only show up at low zoom levels, while names of small streets barely show up at the highest zoom level. And asking Maps to give you a pedestrian or public-transit route to a particular place doesn’t fix this, because GMaps just doesn’t understand what can or cannot be walked through. It thinks public parks are solid obstacles (no roads!) while happily routing you along maintenance paths for subway systems, rail lines, and even airfields. (One time it guided me to walk down the side of an above-grade freeway, outside the concrete side-barriers, squeezing between the barriers and a forest.) And, of course, it still assumes the “entrances” to an address are the car entrances—so, for example, it routes pedestrians to the back alleys behind apartment buildings (because that’s more often where the parking-garage entrance is) rather than the front, where the door is. I don’t live here, Google; I can’t even get into the garage! The thing is, these are such distinct workflows that there’s no reason for Google Maps to be optimizing for one use-case over the other in the first place. It’s immediately apparent which one you’re attempting by your actions upon opening the app; so why not just offer one experience (and set of map tiles) for people attempting car navigation, and a different experience (and set of map tiles) for people attempting pedestrian wayfinding? Or, someone could just come out with a wayfinding app for pedestrians that does its own map rendering. There’s already a Transit app with a UI (and map tiles) optimized for transit-takers; why not a Walkthere app with a UI (and map tiles) optimized for pedestrians? :)

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Honestly, the two use cases have an obvious intersection: a planning/wayfinding session in which I want Google to compute me a route that I want to then inspect, perhaps modify, and then save into my planning session.
dmurray 7y ago
> Or, someone could just come out with a wayfinding app for pedestrians that does its own map rendering. There’s already a Transit app with a UI (and map tiles) optimized for transit-takers; why not a Walkthere app with a UI (and map tiles) optimized for pedestrians? :) This wouldn't really make me happy. It makes more sense to integrate the walking instructions into the Transit app and be good at giving directions for multimodal transport. I need to know if I should get off the bus here, and walk through the park, or wait till three stops later, which leaves me closer as the crow flies but further away overall. The car app doesn't need to work multimodally since it's not normal to drive somewhere, walk 10 minutes, then drive somewhere else. Google maps is still the best general purpose multimodal transport app I've used, but it could be so much better. I'm in Austria right now and it doesn't know about the Austrian buses. There's an app (OEBB Scotty) from the Austrian rail operator which I assume everyone uses instead.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. There's a very subtle point the Twitter thread was making here. This use case may be most popular not because it's what the people want, but because it's all that they can easily do. The tools you use shape how you work, and what you can work on. FWIW, I learned to pay attention when the machine doesn't help me do what I want (it's a good source of ideas for side projects), so I've noticed that I do want a map that works like a map - something I can explore and annotate. I do sometimes resort to screenshotting GMaps, or photographing paper maps in the past, just to have a map on my phone. I've seen non-tech people do that as well. So I can be confident that it's not just me and the Twitter thread's author that want this. > For expert-users the tools that existed decades ago are still there and still usable. Or you can craft your own! The Twitter thread's point (and mine as well) is that expert users can and do work around this degradation. It's a frustrating chore, but it's not all that difficult if you can code a bit and have some spare time. It's the experience for the non-expert users that has degraded in a way they can't fix for themselves. > For non-expert users the information in the world is orders of magnitude more accessible than it used to be. The way it's accessible, it's almost as if it wasn't. Sure, you can easily Google random trivia. But good luck trying to compare things. That's always a pain, and usually involves hoping that someone else made a dedicated tool for similar comparisons on the topic you're interested in, and that the information hardcoded in that tool are current and accurate. Notably, the tools you use for searching have no support for comparing.

shadowgovt 7y ago
> It's the experience for the non-expert users that has degraded in a way they can't fix for themselves. Why not?
- masukomi 7y ago
  because it's not practical to write a Google Maps (or whatever) replacement most of the time? It's a ton of work. Sure we can smooth over rough edges but actually implementing lots of missing non-trivial things? Or, making things faster that rely on some 3rd party back end? Usually either not an option, or not an option without recreating the entire front end.

reaperducer 7y ago

As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. Your sentence starts out like you're stating a fact, but then peters out with "probably." Do you have data on this? I'd posit the opposite: That exploration is far more used in online maps. Aside from Uber drivers, SV types, and wannabe road warrior squinters, nobody uses maps for their daily activities. People know where they're going and they go there without consulting technology. That's why we have traffic jams.

melq 7y ago
I think it depends where you are driving. I live in a large city and there are way more people using maps for their daily activities that you might think. In my parents neighborhood in the suburbs, and in rural areas, I think you're probably right. If there are only a few ways to get somewhere, you probably aren't using maps.
welly 7y ago
People use maps for daily activities all the time. Not to find where they're trying to get to, but for how to get somewhere more quickly - ie. public transport directions, or if it's quicker to walk than go by bus/train/tram.
ncallaway 7y ago
> Your sentence starts out like you're stating a fact, but then peters out with "probably." Fair enough. I'd argue that I put the word probably in the first half of the sentence, so I don't see it as "petering out", but fair enough. I will agree with the critique that I'm making an assumption about mapping use cases, and don't have hard data. I'm happy to be corrected by any real data on the topic.
solidasparagus 7y ago
I think this isn't true at all. The vast majority of people I know use maps solely find something like an ATM/gas station/coffee shop/etc and then figuring out how to get there or how long it would take to get there. We don't have data, but the only people that do are Google and they have designed their UX around this use case. And it has become one of the most used tools on Earth. If we are going to play the 'your comment is bad because you don't have data' game, I think the onus is really on you to prove that the company with all the data is getting it wrong.

SubiculumCode 7y ago

Only thing I'd like is for maps to not give directions for the parts that are obvious for you since you'd done that part a million times i.e. from your home, turn right to get to the freeway

megous 7y ago

That's the major usecase for mobile GMaps, because it absolutely sucks for any other usecase, and thus people can't use it for any other purposes really. Except maybe looking up timetables for a previously known public transport stop (only in certain countries, some have much superior ways to plan public transport travel); planning a transport between two stops if you're not standing at one of them right now probably requires a phd. Also if your mapping app is good, the people will use it as little as possible. That's certainly my desire as a turist. So maybe perverse incentives are at play, if wrong usage metrics are used to improve the app. Anyway, I'm used to using paper maps from the childhood, so ergonomics of mobile phone apps is really irritating, because of how paper maps work so much better for me most of the time.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

goph0 7y ago

> As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. Popularity is not a measure of quality. Also, the snarky tone is unnecessary.

mcguire 7y ago

"As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world." ... "I'm confused by the complaint that the "Maps" app only caters to the 90-percentile use case for maps, but doesn't cover the other uses-cases well." Seems like there is an awful lot of room between "probably the most popular use case" and "90-percentile use case", no?

marcosdumay 7y ago

> As it turns out, that is probably the most popular use case for maps in the world. I don't think fully deciding an entire path was ever the major use of paper maps. But well, now that apps only allow for this usage, I am pretty sure it's the most popular one. Personally, I very rarely use maps this way. What makes Google shit useless for me (worse, actually, because it insists on opening by default, and people now decided they can send a Google marker instead of an address, and Google makes it impossible to retrieve data from a marker). Most people I know, faced with the option of turn by turn directions or nothing choose nothing nearly all the time.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Personally, I never use turn-by-turn even to walk around in unknown places, because it loses context. Instead, I stop at the screen that shows the route options; I don't press "Start" to activate the nav. Besides being more useful when walking around, it doesn't eat such ridiculous amounts of battery power that the turn-by-turn nav does for some reason.