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The Google Maps thing isn’t entirely about screen size (though I would hope it wouldn’t be quite so bad on larger screens—but I’m only familiar with how it look

The Google Maps thing isn’t entirely about screen size (though I would hope it wouldn’t be quite so bad on larger screens—but I’m only familiar with how it looks on a small-by-modern-standards Android phone, where it’s about the same as on the iPhone depicted in this article, or even a little less); it’s about the product’s overarching philosophy, which has changed over the past decade (in a direction I strongly dislike). It used to be about, y’know, maps, but maps are now incidental, a means to a different end, ably demonstrated by their icon change a year ago from a map to a location pin. It’s all about the destinations now, and mapping has progressively deteriorated and been deemphasised. At least in the case depicted, you should be able to get it to show just the map by tapping once in the map area. (If you’re interested in more about this, https://www.justinobeirne.com https://www.justinobeirne.com has some excellent long-form content analysing all the major maps products, how they’ve changed over time, &c. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-new-app-icon https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-new-app-icon and https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps are good brief starting points.)

sfvisser 6y ago
Google Maps is not much better on larger screens unfortunately. It’s almost as if it wants to obscure the map area, no matter what you try. When using it you kind of feel how a once pioneering piece of tech and UX initially built by a small team got taken over by corporate Google which knows best what their users need...
- mleonhard 6y ago
  Google makes what will get the team members promoted. That is rarely what the users need.
jiggawatts 6y ago
While we're on the topic: YouTube, which is inherently a video content viewing service, goes out of its way to obscure the video content. The TV app, the mobile app, and the browser app all insist on overlaying the content with random garbage that no sane human being could possibly be more interested in that the content that they launched with the intention of watching! Heaven help you if you open a popular live feed. The wall of random teenage stream-of-thought noise streaming down across the video is just unspeakably crass. Why was this added, you ask? Because some overpaid manager at Google saw that Facebook was doing more video, so turning a video streaming service into a social network seemed like a brilliant idea. I mean why not? Why wouldn't people watching NASA feeds want snotty little kids spaming swearwords on their television? PS: products slowly morphing to become nigh unrecognisable is a pre-Internet issue. The MTV channel used to show just music videos!
- smileybarry 6y ago
  YouTube added live chat not because of Facebook, but because of Twitch which popularized this live-video-with-synchronized-chat. (except on Twitch it's about 1-10s of delay where on YouTube it's 30+ minimum) Facebook and YouTube then borrowed that feature when they added livestreaming.
  - the_jeremy 6y ago
    Things[0][1] I've looked at says Twitch's delay is much longer than 1s. [0]: https://www.fairlyoddstreamers.com/post/twitch-stream-delay https://www.fairlyoddstreamers.com/post/twitch-stream-delay [1]: https://onetwostream.com/blog/twitch-delay/ https://onetwostream.com/blog/twitch-delay/
    - deadmutex 6y ago
      Understatement
    - anonymousab 6y ago
      The delay depends on a lot of things, from configurable settings for the streamer (both on twitch and on their machine) and for the viewer (low-latency mode, and sometimes, explicitly not! using it), as well as things outside of their control - in Twitch's infra and just general internet latency. It's not uncommon for streamers to display their chat in a sidebar on the stream, or overlaid on the content itself. From this, I've observed delays as low as (or maybe a bit lower than) a second, and as high as 30s - though I haven't seen anything nearly that high in a long time. I suspect bigger or more successful streamers are prioritized on Twitch's backend. But I think the threshold for "successful" is actually rather low - someone consistently getting just hundreds of viewers is probably there already, in that top percentile.
    - smileybarry 6y ago
      Like others said, it depends -- if you have low latency streaming on as a streamer + low-latency viewing by the viewer + good enough internet, your "latency to broadcaster" can drop to 1 point something. What you linked is streamers intentionally increasing their delay to account for stream sniping, but many streamers keep their delay not-extended to allow for better chat interaction. In some games, increasing delay to prevent sniping is just ineffective -- Valorant can regularly have 5+ minute queues in top ranks, and there's few enough players that even if you enter the queue very late, you can still run into them.
asiachick 6y ago
Maps does what I want in this instance. The display shows results for what I searched for. If I want the map I tap the map. If I want to see more search results I scroll down. I'm not seeing any problem. I want those search results when I search. Where would you suggest they put them. The screen is already small, putting them just on the map would make it hard to provide any details to help you find the thing you were searching for
- kuschku 6y ago
  The big issue is having them on the map, without reloading the search results when the map is zoomed/panned, without the map obscured. They absolutely don't support that use case anymore :(
shorts_theory 6y ago
That website is incredible. I had no idea I would be so engrossed in reading about the size and shape of map labels and the shape of building in a phone map application.
ramraj07 6y ago
I have followed the brilliance of google maps from an ux perspective for decades now, and don’t fault them that much for their new changes: it has become much more common now that I actually don’t care much about where a place is, more only about if I found the right place, and how do I get there. If I use public transit then the map becomes even more irrelevant. Given how good Googles places info is, the only time the map becomes relevant is once I start turn by turn directions, at which point it again shows one of the best UIs out there for that purpose.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  Meanwhile, I get frustrated by the changes in their cartography style almost every time I use Google Maps. Most of the time I do want an actual map, and even when I’m not so fussed about that, the old style conveyed more useful details for the sorts of things I was doing. If you want to explore an area geographically, the changes have been terrible. It’s not uniformly worse than it was a decade ago; there are some areas like highlighting business districts and such where in the last decade they’ve— uh— caught up with paper maps. But if Google Maps presented me with a “show maps like they were ten years ago” option, I’d enable it in an instant, because the cons of the last decade have been far greater than the pros for how I, all my family and most of my friends use it.
  - iggldiggl 6y ago
    Absolutely, which is why I definitively prefer OSM for that purpose.

sfvisser 6y ago

Google Maps is not much better on larger screens unfortunately. It’s almost as if it wants to obscure the map area, no matter what you try. When using it you kind of feel how a once pioneering piece of tech and UX initially built by a small team got taken over by corporate Google which knows best what their users need...

mleonhard 6y ago
Google makes what will get the team members promoted. That is rarely what the users need.

jiggawatts 6y ago

While we're on the topic: YouTube, which is inherently a video content viewing service, goes out of its way to obscure the video content. The TV app, the mobile app, and the browser app all insist on overlaying the content with random garbage that no sane human being could possibly be more interested in that the content that they launched with the intention of watching! Heaven help you if you open a popular live feed. The wall of random teenage stream-of-thought noise streaming down across the video is just unspeakably crass. Why was this added, you ask? Because some overpaid manager at Google saw that Facebook was doing more video, so turning a video streaming service into a social network seemed like a brilliant idea. I mean why not? Why wouldn't people watching NASA feeds want snotty little kids spaming swearwords on their television? PS: products slowly morphing to become nigh unrecognisable is a pre-Internet issue. The MTV channel used to show just music videos!

smileybarry 6y ago
YouTube added live chat not because of Facebook, but because of Twitch which popularized this live-video-with-synchronized-chat. (except on Twitch it's about 1-10s of delay where on YouTube it's 30+ minimum) Facebook and YouTube then borrowed that feature when they added livestreaming.
- the_jeremy 6y ago
  Things[0][1] I've looked at says Twitch's delay is much longer than 1s. [0]: https://www.fairlyoddstreamers.com/post/twitch-stream-delay https://www.fairlyoddstreamers.com/post/twitch-stream-delay [1]: https://onetwostream.com/blog/twitch-delay/ https://onetwostream.com/blog/twitch-delay/
  - deadmutex 6y ago
    Understatement
  - anonymousab 6y ago
    The delay depends on a lot of things, from configurable settings for the streamer (both on twitch and on their machine) and for the viewer (low-latency mode, and sometimes, explicitly not! using it), as well as things outside of their control - in Twitch's infra and just general internet latency. It's not uncommon for streamers to display their chat in a sidebar on the stream, or overlaid on the content itself. From this, I've observed delays as low as (or maybe a bit lower than) a second, and as high as 30s - though I haven't seen anything nearly that high in a long time. I suspect bigger or more successful streamers are prioritized on Twitch's backend. But I think the threshold for "successful" is actually rather low - someone consistently getting just hundreds of viewers is probably there already, in that top percentile.
  - smileybarry 6y ago
    Like others said, it depends -- if you have low latency streaming on as a streamer + low-latency viewing by the viewer + good enough internet, your "latency to broadcaster" can drop to 1 point something. What you linked is streamers intentionally increasing their delay to account for stream sniping, but many streamers keep their delay not-extended to allow for better chat interaction. In some games, increasing delay to prevent sniping is just ineffective -- Valorant can regularly have 5+ minute queues in top ranks, and there's few enough players that even if you enter the queue very late, you can still run into them.

asiachick 6y ago

Maps does what I want in this instance. The display shows results for what I searched for. If I want the map I tap the map. If I want to see more search results I scroll down. I'm not seeing any problem. I want those search results when I search. Where would you suggest they put them. The screen is already small, putting them just on the map would make it hard to provide any details to help you find the thing you were searching for

kuschku 6y ago
The big issue is having them on the map, without reloading the search results when the map is zoomed/panned, without the map obscured. They absolutely don't support that use case anymore :(

shorts_theory 6y ago

That website is incredible. I had no idea I would be so engrossed in reading about the size and shape of map labels and the shape of building in a phone map application.

ramraj07 6y ago

I have followed the brilliance of google maps from an ux perspective for decades now, and don’t fault them that much for their new changes: it has become much more common now that I actually don’t care much about where a place is, more only about if I found the right place, and how do I get there. If I use public transit then the map becomes even more irrelevant. Given how good Googles places info is, the only time the map becomes relevant is once I start turn by turn directions, at which point it again shows one of the best UIs out there for that purpose.

chrismorgan 6y ago
Meanwhile, I get frustrated by the changes in their cartography style almost every time I use Google Maps. Most of the time I do want an actual map, and even when I’m not so fussed about that, the old style conveyed more useful details for the sorts of things I was doing. If you want to explore an area geographically, the changes have been terrible. It’s not uniformly worse than it was a decade ago; there are some areas like highlighting business districts and such where in the last decade they’ve— uh— caught up with paper maps. But if Google Maps presented me with a “show maps like they were ten years ago” option, I’d enable it in an instant, because the cons of the last decade have been far greater than the pros for how I, all my family and most of my friends use it.
- iggldiggl 6y ago
  Absolutely, which is why I definitively prefer OSM for that purpose.