16 ms·

15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps

265 points by JohnHammersley 3y ago

ericzawo 3y ago
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.
- chrismcb 3y ago
  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
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  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.
  - gorbachev 3y ago
    Freeze pane...you're so right about that one. Every time I want to use it, it's like a 5-minute needle in the haystack search.
    - tbyehl 3y ago
      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.
      - gorbachev 3y ago
        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.
        drpixie 3y ago
        YES - The ribbon UI has been around for ... what, decades, now. And it's still less usable that regular menus :(
- vaxman 3y ago
  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. ;) https://youtu.be/dX3k_QDnzHE https://youtu.be/dX3k_QDnzHE
- tdeck 3y ago
  > thereby making it worse, with no option for a user to even revert back to the old design This makes me wonder if Slack hired a bunch of PMs from Google recently.
booboofixer 3y ago
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.
sudohackthenews 3y ago
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. Nitter: https://nitter.net/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182 https://nitter.net/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182
chupchap 3y ago
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.
gardenhedge 3y ago
The latest update to Google Maps hasn't been too bad but a previous update (I can't remember when exactly - a good few years ago) made it much worse
- etimberg 3y ago
  yeah, an update I think about 2 years ago created zoom levels where some highways appear disconnected because the connections stop rendering too early.
Bluecobra 3y ago
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?
- gramakri2 3y ago
  what we need is skins and themes like... winamp!
  - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
    Winamp was the perfect combination of UX and skeuomorphism.
    - goldenkey 3y ago
      It kicks the Llama-7B's ass!
      - Daneel_ 3y ago
        Milkdrop for Google maps: incoming!
        goldenkey 3y ago
        Taps "Time Walk" and pulls out Jon Finkel's Tinker deck
  - Doctor_Fegg 3y ago
    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)
- 3y ago
tomrod 3y ago
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.
jokethrowaway 3y ago
I like the old color tone better - but Google Maps has been going downhill since 2014-15
gramakri2 3y ago
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.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  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"
jug 3y ago
Is it a competition at Google on who can come up with the brightest and lowest contrast map colors? Maybe it’s like a rite of passage… This is also how a map could look: https://postimg.cc/fVZvw8qJ https://postimg.cc/fVZvw8qJ
- darkclouds 3y ago
  [dead]
- dorkwood 3y ago
  Main roads and buildings are both yellow? It would be better to make one of them purple or something.
- Daneel_ 3y ago
  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! https://www.mapsbookstravelguides.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/perth_sd_ubd_sample-14.jpg https://www.mapsbookstravelguides.com.au/wp-content/uploads/... https://www.mapsbookstravelguides.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/south_west_wa_sd_ubd_sample-7.jpg https://www.mapsbookstravelguides.com.au/wp-content/uploads/...
  - Izkata 3y ago
    The CTA (Chicago public transportation) has maps like these up at every train station and every sheltered bus stop: https://www.transitchicago.com/maps/downtown/ https://www.transitchicago.com/maps/downtown/
  - amf12 3y ago
    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.
- amf12 3y ago
  The colors are a bit too bright for my taste. Also not color-blind friendly.
scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago
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”.
- nostrebored 3y ago
  Anecdotally I’m way more likely to care about a grocery than any of the locations you’ve mentioned. The goal isn’t creating a historical representation of where things were. It’s supposed to be functional.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    > 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.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > A subtle dark pattern that Google uses is that they have roughly one size of POI How many useful sizes could they have on a phone? > the profit motive (pay for prominence) Can you pay for this?
      - 15kingben 3y ago
        > Can you pay for this? Yes - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9934637?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9934637?hl=en
megous 3y ago
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.
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  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.
- CogitoCogito 3y ago
  > 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.
awongh 3y ago
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.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  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.
  - korm 3y ago
    Search: "pizza", filters: 4.5+ star rating. 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.
    - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
      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.
- mechhacker 3y ago
  They keep breaking zoom too. 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.
nostrebored 3y ago
Are we using different apps? 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.
akarlsten 3y ago
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!
hackerman_fi 3y ago
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.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Yes - the fact that the suggestion removed the useful words for people who don't interpret samey symbols all day spoke volumes.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  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.
phmqk76 3y ago
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.
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  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
  - freediver 3y ago
    If you select Kagi Search in Orion, you should have the option to enter your token.
    - Obscurity4340 3y ago
      I meant like I do that all the time but ill be damned if i have to "log in" to use my broswer lol
- Cyberdog 3y ago
  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.
- nicoburns 3y ago
  > On a side note, I haven’t found an easy way to use Google search logged out, but have a Gmail tab open Firefox container tabs are ideal for this kind of thing
gerdesj 3y ago
I suggest it is wrong or even dangerous to plot unauthenticated sites. For example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9465831,-2.6376033,18.96z?entry=ttu 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/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu 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
nomy99 3y ago
I like the new update and I think author needs to let her cynicism aside and focus on the fact that a product revitalization is almost always due.
- werdnapk 3y ago
  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.
  - quitit 3y ago
    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. However there are examples of the night mode driving directions having unintuitive colours: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/17yv4qp/google_maps_has_updated/ 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.)
- qwertox 3y ago
  I disklike it. It looks dead. It might be better for driving, but not so for things dealing with nature. Also I get the feeling that smaller streets disappeared, forcing me to enable the cycling mode.
- izacus 3y ago
  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.
Obscurity4340 3y ago
What do you think about MagicEarth?
shaicoleman 3y ago
The new version doesn't show most of the street names. Not even the major roads. Screenshot: https://i.ibb.co/qszKNSm/google-maps-labels.png https://i.ibb.co/qszKNSm/google-maps-labels.png Example URL: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5041929,-0.111821,17.46z https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5041929,-0.111821,17.46z
- kazinator 3y ago
  I've noticed that. I zoom and zoom and zoom, yet the street name is not appearing! 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?
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    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.
    - pests 3y ago
      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.
    - CogitoCogito 3y ago
      > 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”?
tokai 3y ago
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.
wsc981 3y ago
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 ...
- Cyberdog 3y ago
  Why not just use the Mail app to access your Gmail account and bypass the inferior web interface altogether?
  - wsc981 3y 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.
  - whitten 3y ago
    Some of us think that the mail app is the inferior. Search on the app uses my phone’s cpu. search on the web site uses their cpu. Guess which is faster ?
- zelos 3y ago
120bits 3y ago
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.
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
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
- drpixie 3y ago
  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!
pentagrama 3y ago
A bit off topic but I didn't know that on X people can post this long form texts with images in between (it seems that lacks headings). Is nice! A blogging experience added to a popular platform. I guess is a paid feature, fair to me. Also I don't have an account and I'm able to read it. Some years ago I appreciated the character limit of Twitter because people have to be creative and to the point to express themselves, but with the years I start to thinking that this limitation was also a curse for communication overall on the platform.
- legostormtroopr 3y ago
  > the years I start to thinking that this limitation was also a curse for communication overall on the platform I would say the popularity of Twitter and its 140 character limit were a curse for communication fullstop. Globally, and irreversibly. Facebook gets a lot of flak for being an echo chamber with targetted ads and disinformation, but Twitter never got the same level of critique in damaging online discourse. Twitter specifically required people for a long time not to have long well-thought out ideas - but require hot takes and nothing else. Every political, social or economic position that was discussed had to be distilled to 140 characters - this effectively scrubbed nuance from any position. Along with retweets, this meant that all news, and all online discourse was reduced to "the hottest takes" without any level of complex thought.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Twitter is probably relatively most popular in Japan, and 140 characters is not a problem in Japanese, so this wouldn't be a global issue. I think they doubled it to 280 forever ago anyway.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  I absolutely hate this post. It's reasonably well structured because the author really cared & clearly spent time structuring it. But having a bunch of smaller posts comprising a thread would be much better blocking for me. I don't log in, so I can't read the comments, but it also is sorely missed that I can't see people reply to specific ideas or comments. It's all just a soupy unstructured mess. We already had blogs. Why we'd take a medium built for interaction & turn it into a place for long winded things that should be articles or blogs doesn't make sense to me.
contingencies 3y ago
Well, star me a flag, and export me a geolayer! Want to go here! Search this area! And by "layers", I mean satellite! Everyone: rush, to the beige! Contrast is too PC! An Apple a day! Let's speak in tones!
rajbot 3y ago
""" Here’s how it could look: - Keep the search box - Keep the bottom bar - Remove everything else from the map """ If you followed these suggestions you would end up with something that looks very much like Apple Maps
- stathibus 3y ago
  Google has still not recovered from the internal cultural disaster that was material design.
- DHPersonal 3y ago
  The Apple Maps UI is so much better than Google Maps.
sergiotapia 3y ago
At night the design choices are really bad. The active route and the alternate routes look so close in hex color, it's made me drive through the wrong wrong twice in the last few days. Example: https://twitter.com/chinmaymaps/status/1725752799944663443/photo/1 https://twitter.com/chinmaymaps/status/1725752799944663443/p... You may think it's easy to differentiate in the screenshot, but look at it on a small phone screen at night while driving. I hope Google changes this
- pimlottc 3y ago
  I’m confused, I don’t see any alternate routes in that screenshot?
wodenokoto 3y ago
Don't remove the text from the icons. I have no idea what the proposed buttons do, and since the icons changed i can't even reference the bad design. But i agree on the colors. It is just not nice to look at.
saewitz 3y ago
Recommend justinobeirne.com if you are interested in this kind of stuff.
abanayev 3y ago
I love the ideas but when did Xs/tweets become so long?
- SPBS 3y ago
  Everyone who you see posting tweets longer 280 characters is paying for the premium subscription, which leads me to believe X might actually be more successful (more sustainable?) than old Twitter in terms of monetization.
summerlight 3y ago
This particular color change is not very popular inside Google during its dogfooding and received lots of feedback, but yet the product team decided to push this. I don't know what happened in the team internally, but it looks like now those product people care less and less about internal feedback from arguably most enthusiastic users.
- spankalee 3y ago
  That sounds like most internal feedback since Google+
- harryVic 3y ago
  It's completely wild to me that the maps org has more than 10,000 people.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    If they were just developing software that would be way too many, sure. But if you count streetview car drivers trying to drive every street in the entire world every few years, people manually moderating crowdsourced contributions, people updating the map for all new construction worldwide, people working to maintain business listings for every business with a physical location (including those without much web presence), people dealing with adversaries who want to list their fake '24 hour emergency locksmith' all over every city, people parsing train and bus timetables in every city worldwide no matter how awful their websites are, an advertising sales team specifically targeting smaller businesses who are interested in local advertising...
  - jillesvangurp 3y ago
    Nokia Maps (I used to work there) when they acquired Navteq back in 2006 or so was something like 7000 people or so, most of them in Navteq. Navteq had employees and people in most countries in the world to be able to gather mapping data and work with local authorities. It's now called Here and they still have 9000 employees or so (in 2019 according to wikipedia). That's after years of decline and layoffs. The Navteq acquisition is what prompted Google to create their own maps. They were licensing Teleatlas (now Tom Tom) and Navteq maps before that. Apple made the same move a few years later. I think Steve Jobs was still around. I bet Apple has a few thousand people working on this topic as well. That's just what it takes to build and maintain a world map and assorted geospatial technologies, datasets, etc.
hnbalsamicw 3y ago
It's only after reading the post do i realize how shitty and cluttered the UI has become.
mepiethree 3y ago
I think the widgets are important. One of the primary ways I use Google maps is to punch in new directions quickly while at a red light or something. I want to press one button. The “home” and “gas” buttons help here. I certainly do not want features “buried” in the app where I need to tap more things frantically. I think the map is the most important thing, and the current design reflects this, but it isn’t SO important that everything else should go away. I don’t really care what a designer from 15 years ago thinks. The current designers do a good job.
- jamespo 3y ago
  So you break the law using your phone while driving (depending on jurisdiction).
  - dannyw 3y ago
    At least in my jurisdiction (NSW, Aus), you can use and interact with navigational tools while driving.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  So you're just aimlessly driving around somewhere unfamiliar and suddenly think "I want to go home!"?
  - mike_d 3y ago
    Yes. You've gotten out of the underground parking garage, have good GPS/cell signal again, and want to go home. Even when I know exactly where I am going and the route I want to use i'll often map it anyways so I can find out about traffic or accidents ahead.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > i'll often map it anyways so I can find out about traffic or accidents ahead. You mean doing the very thing Google Maps sucks at - i.e. being a map?
throwaway290 3y ago
Meanwhile, bugs galore. Since last month, any time I am looking at Google Maps, the podcast or music playing in the background will stop every few seconds. Not with navigation directions or review open, simply looking at the map it just grabs exclusive control of iOS audio for some unfathomable reason and plays nothing. Add to this the years old issue with inability to remove hundreds of old starred places. You can remove them using the app, you can go to starred list in web GUI and do it from there, but they all come back. But yeah, someone decided it was worthwhile to spend the time on the damned color change. GMaps still have strong points, like all the integrations that result in mostly correct regarding public transportation routes around the world or the review system which I am sure is a pain to keep up with the amount of UGC they're getting.
fallingfrog 3y ago
Is the teal maybe some kind of color blindness friendly feature? Or just 90’s nostalgia
c0pium 3y ago
The author wants to make google maps pretty and less usable. Minimalist software looks nice, but it is always at the cost of usability and especially discoverability. I don’t actually want to see a map when I open a maps app, I want to know where I can get coffee. The pills are amazing for that. Make the software you get paid for functional, and try to win awards with side projects nobody but the committee cares about.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
onetokeoverthe 3y ago
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coolgoose 3y ago
I am happy it's not just grumpy man sindrom for me regarding this change. I do find the new map colors distracting for no reason
- guappa 3y ago
  I've disabled auto updates on the phone a long time ago. I occasionally update the webview thing to hopefully not get hacked (doesn't matter much, samsung isn't diligent with the base system anyway). I noticed that when apps get updated usually it is to move around all the buttons and add ads, so unless they stop working there is hardly reason to update in my opinion.
shanghaikid 3y ago
Thank you for the greate product design.
Symbiote 3y ago
I recently had a problem with data on my phone, so part way through a long car trip I had to use OSMAnd over Android Auto. Normally I only use that when hiking. It was wonderful! All the roads had high contrast with the background, so in a dense and unfamiliar city "in 500m turn left onto Smith Street" was so much easier! With a brief glance at the screen I could see how many streets there were, and they were labelled with their names. It isn't perfect, but it showed how bad Google Maps had become. I used it for the rest of the trip. Google had white-on-beige for streets, so the displayed map was essentially useless. The new colours look like a small improvement. Edit: I tried to find a screenshot of OSMAnd, but nothing looks like what I saw in the car. I don't have a car to check, it was only a rental. Maybe it was like this picture in the documentation: https://osmand.net/docs/user/navigation/auto-car/#map-appearance https://osmand.net/docs/user/navigation/auto-car/#map-appear... but I thought I had it in light mode too.
frereubu 3y ago
To try and remove myself from Google as much as possible I've been trying Apple Maps again after previous bad experiences, and much prefer it now. The only exception is place information, including opening hours etc, for which Google is much better. I'm pretty sure the difference is to do with incentives, where Apple isn't trying to sell ads in Maps. That seems to have lead to things in Google Maps like location pins outcompeting basic information like road names, which doesn't happen in Apple Maps. There's clearly a trade-off there, that I think Google has started to get very wrong. For what it's worth I also don't like the new colours. I guess people will get used to it after a while, but I question the wisdom of a change like that in a situation where colours have meaning - there should be a very good reason for that kind of change, and I haven't seen anything to back that up. If anything the opposite where, for example, route information is harder to see in dark mode.
- wanderingmind 3y ago
  OsmAnd is fantastic if you are looking for a Google Maps replacement and much better at navigation especially for biking and walking
  - jwestbury 3y ago
    If you're in a city which supports it, the best non-driving maps app is CityMapper. So, so, so much better at public transportation and blended trips.
theanonymousone 3y ago
In every discussion about Google Maps, I feel obliged to mention that it does not show speed limits in Switzerland, despite the official support page[0] saying otherwise! Isn't this insanely beautiful/ridiculous that nobody seems to care? [0] https://developers.google.com/maps/coverage https://developers.google.com/maps/coverage
- CommonGuy 3y ago
  It shows the speed limit for me (I'm Swiss). Not sure if only on selected streets or everywhere.
  - theanonymousone 3y ago
    Are you in a big city? For me speed limits appear the moment I cross the border to Italy or get off the plane in UK, but never in Switzerland (or Germany where I have also checked it). I have the setting enabled and everything.
- izacus 3y ago
  Speed limits have started showing up for me in Switzerland in last few months, so it seems like something is moving. Having said that, they're commonly hillariously wrong. No, I don't think those tight mountain roads have limit of 80 (especially after just driving past a 50 sign :P).
aeyes 3y ago
Remember how Maps marks walkable centric areas of interest in yellow? It's now almost indistinguishable from the normal building colors, in the sun on your phone you definitely can't make out the difference. I was in a new city last week where this feature would have been useful to explore the city center but I just wasn't able to see it.
TonyTrapp 3y ago
Even before the current design change, it was almost impossible for me to navigate using Google Maps. With OpenStreetMap, it's easy for me to extract the features of my surroundings: - The shape and size of houses. Yes, you can see individual buildings in Google Maps, but they are almost indistinguishable from the background. - It tells me at a glance whether some area is a forest or just a field. Everything's just the same color in Google Maps. - Streets that I should probably not set a foot on (highways) have a distinct color. This is really bad now with the redesign. - No problem figuring out if an area is serviced by trams or trains, you see their tracks clearly and don't need to zoom in looking for individual stations. Again you can extract this information from Google Maps if you squint, but tram tracks next to streets are almost invisible. Especially with this update, prominent colors are given only to streets, which may make sense if you use Google Maps in your car. But as a pedestrian or cyclist, all the other information about my surroundings is much more important to me.
- widerporst 3y ago
  >It tells me at a glance whether some area is a forest or just a field. Everything's just the same color in Google Maps. Thank you. Everyone is talking about the color of the water or the roads, but this doesn't even bother me. But having all vegetation of any kind in the same color is an absolutely mind-bogglingly stupid decision. I can't be the only one who uses Maps to check the extents of a forest, for example. Or who uses shapes of different land uses to quickly orient oneself on a map.
  - andromeduck 3y ago
    Yeah, it's quite clear the designers have never lived outside lived of a car sewer. Every justification they've given thus far circle back to contrast for road features and while driving. It's peak car brain.
    - 4wsn 3y ago
      Car sewer? Car brain? Wow, didn't know we had zealotry and disparagement over _choice of transport_ of all things, generally a matter people have little choice in; it's determined by where you live and what sort of life you have.
ssijak 3y ago
I love the update, love the widgets on the screen and love the new colors.
retrocryptid 3y ago
In 2009 I had extensive conversations with the design team. The scale device is a critical feature for people who want to use the maps app as a map. Google's response to it's removal then was they expected people only use the maps app as a "background upon to place directions." That's why they only display major street names, only display ranges in the context of directions and keep removing the scale device. It's not a map application, it's a wayfinder.
tjbiddle 3y ago
My biggest gripe is trying to read road names. So many times I'll see a road name, and I start to zoom in - only to have it now disappear - to then zoom out again and it doesn't show at all - to zoom in again and then 50/50 I can see it. Drives me nuts. Where I'm living (Indonesia) most people reference parts of town by the major road nearby. I try to learn where the hell I am in a certain new locale by looking at the road name (They aren't often seen on physical signs, either) and it takes me forever to find it. Doesn't help that it's a regular practice that the road name changes after some time, even though it's the same road.
- nzealand 3y ago
  Drop a pin. It sucks. I know.
  - k8svet 3y ago
    This is one of those comments I'll think about hundreds of times, followed by remembering how dumb I feel right now, that this has never occurred to me. Thanks for the tip.
- rjh29 3y ago
  That happens for businesses too, it's maddening!
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Yeah, I zoom in all the way to a building I know is a business to look up opening times etc, but the name just doesn't appear. I don't get it.
    - alexjurkiewicz 3y ago
      Now they can sell advertising to businesses and guarantee improved CTR.
- tzfld 3y ago
  The same with contour line elevations. They are unreadably small, and when zooming in enough they just disappear. Hate it.
wolpoli 3y ago
It seems that every element is now pill shaped. What went wrong with rectangles with slightly rounded corners? Are they going to get the top and bottom curved out as well and give us oval next?
eviks 3y ago
The huge missing part is customization : give users easy as stable way to clean up your garbage, and you wouldn't need to wait 15 years to complaint about obvious UI design fails
phgn 3y ago
Seems like the Maps team want us to know that they still exist?
grey_earthling 3y ago
Now would be a good moment for OpenStreetMap to make the Tracestrack Topo layer their default view — it's much clearer than their current default; even more so when compared to Google's attempt. => https://www.openstreetmap.org/?layers=P https://www.openstreetmap.org/?layers=P
- RicoElectrico 3y ago
  Won't happen as the default layer has mapper feedback as one of the explicit goals.
  - executesorder66 3y ago
    How does that layer hinder mapper feedback if it becomes the default?
    - habi 3y ago
      The current default layer [1] has a short 'turnaround' time, meaning that changed tiles are quickly rendered, giving very short feedback time. The Tracestrack Topo is provided by a third party, without explicitly stated re-rendering turnaround times. [1]: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto
- habi 3y ago
  > As far as I can tell, Tracestrack’s style is currently a closed-source style, which makes it an unlikely candidate for a default layer. See https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/osm-carto-maintainers-refusing-to-render-approved-highway-busway/103289/93 https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/osm-carto-maintainers-... for a bit of discussion on this on the OSM community Forum.
janalsncm 3y ago
> The map should be sacred real estate. Only things that are highly useful to many people should obscure it. This got me thinking. It would be neat if apps could adapt their UI to the features I use the most. Not what most people use. What I use. Rather than finding the UI that pleases the largest number of people somewhat, create adaptive UIs that fit my usage patterns at a highly granular level.
- walteweiss 3y ago
  I was thinking the same thought like 10 years ago, and I even forgot I had the idea back then. And now with all the other (especially hardware) enhancements — which I think is way more complicated! — I’m surprised it’s not a reality these days. I am sure this is the Way.
xinayder 3y ago
As I wrote on the other discussion for this same tweet: I don't see how the color scheme change helps with accessibility and readability. Okay, maybe the contrast with road names was bad before, but the major point was that important roads (like avenues) were highlighted in YELLOW. Now every road is the same color and you can't distinguish between important and secondary roads. They sacrificed usability for "readability". They could've achieved a mix of both (maybe change/increase street name?), change the font color, but the issues still remain. You must zoom in to see a road name and it doesn't work most of the times.
piva00 3y ago
The parks, forests, fields, and woodlands around me now are all the same colour. At least to my eyes it's just a sea of mint-coloured blobs with no distinction whatsoever... I don't see a single improvement with the new colour scheme, the lack of contrast also makes the built area around me almost fade into the mint-coloured blobs.
mkii 3y ago
Anyone else notice how Google Maps has indexed everyone's covid cottage industry LLC registration? It's like I can't view any neighborhood around me now without people's random consultancy, auto repair hobby, travel agent gig, Etsy store, etc. cluttering up the map! Super annoying!
- gniv 3y ago
  Yes, very annoying. But I suspect it's the business owners that add them. If you see stuff that's online only (shopping sites) I think it's fair to report them.
deleted 3y ago
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robbywashere_ 3y ago
[flagged]
- Luddberg 3y ago
  This is an almost word-for-word rewording of tjbiddle‘s post (first reply at the moment). Why?
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    what a bizzare mystery! I wonder if they're trying to test a karma farming algorithm for later influence peddling/manipulation.
- dang 3y ago
  You can't do this here, and I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use HN as intended in the future.
causality0 3y ago
Does he have any pull with the current team? Because God damn, the new color scheme is hard to read. It's so low-contrast all the roads and grass and water look like one big aqua smear. For me Google Maps has sucked ever since they merged Maps and Navigate into a single app, preventing you from using many Maps functions while navigating somewhere.
kuon 3y ago
In Switzerland with have the swisstopo map which is really good in term of readability. I often refer to it to explain what a good map is.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  Same in UK with Ordnance survey ! Maps that actually let one navigate the world, rather than only via roads
orloffm 3y ago
When I read comments to posts like this, what amazes me is the level of denial people have about huge corporations. It's just not possible to do a rework like that, there is no one who can decide on that, no one who knows exactly what strings have to be pushed (all the platforms, all the teams, all the application layers, all the documentation/PR/support layers), no one who has time in daily work to see it all through, no one who can take responsibility if revenue slightly dips, no one who can approve this and take responsibility if the guy who has the plan in mind quits, etc. Sure, some high-level manager has formal power to force this, but how will he or she make sure it happens exactly?
RicoElectrico 3y ago
If you don't rely heavily on car navigation (sorry, no live traffic) then give Organic Maps (https://organicmaps.app https://organicmaps.app) a try. I think Google Maps mess is partially due to PMs beholden to some OKRs. Stepping back a bit I wonder how much inconvenience do these people inflict upon us. Think about it. You rolled out a mobile app for a business/device/whatever. Best way to boost installs and impress your manager? Artificially gate features behind it.
nojvek 3y ago
I wish open street maps had vectorized maps instead of the tiled images. Google maps is in need of real competition. It feels stagnant and regressing over time.
- dalkvist 3y ago
  Several companies have osm vector tiles, mapbox among them. Osm.org isn't really for end-users, the focus is on mappers.
xwowsersx 3y ago
I quite like the new colors. Not the ones for the roads, but the softer greens etc are just much easier on the eyes
getpost 3y ago
I see lots of complaints about street names not rendering, and that has been a problem for me as well. The tweet author has a separate thread about how India doesn't routinely have street names, and how that lead to a design change for maps. It's super interesting! https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1719379064564166772 https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1719379064564166772 EDIT: The following link is among the replies in that Twitter thread. Anatomy of an Indian Address [50th Edition] [AUG 7, 2023] https://newsletter.theindianotes.com/p/anatomy-of-an-indian-address https://newsletter.theindianotes.com/p/anatomy-of-an-indian-...

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.

chrismcb 3y ago
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
AlbertCory 3y ago
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.
- gorbachev 3y ago
  Freeze pane...you're so right about that one. Every time I want to use it, it's like a 5-minute needle in the haystack search.
  - tbyehl 3y ago
    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.
    - gorbachev 3y ago
      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.
      - drpixie 3y ago
        YES - The ribbon UI has been around for ... what, decades, now. And it's still less usable that regular menus :(
vaxman 3y ago
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. ;) https://youtu.be/dX3k_QDnzHE https://youtu.be/dX3k_QDnzHE
tdeck 3y ago
> thereby making it worse, with no option for a user to even revert back to the old design This makes me wonder if Slack hired a bunch of PMs from Google recently.

booboofixer 3y ago

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.

sudohackthenews 3y ago

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. Nitter: https://nitter.net/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182 https://nitter.net/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182

chupchap 3y ago

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.

gardenhedge 3y ago

The latest update to Google Maps hasn't been too bad but a previous update (I can't remember when exactly - a good few years ago) made it much worse

etimberg 3y ago
yeah, an update I think about 2 years ago created zoom levels where some highways appear disconnected because the connections stop rendering too early.

Bluecobra 3y ago

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?

gramakri2 3y ago
what we need is skins and themes like... winamp!
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  Winamp was the perfect combination of UX and skeuomorphism.
  - goldenkey 3y ago
    It kicks the Llama-7B's ass!
    - Daneel_ 3y ago
      Milkdrop for Google maps: incoming!
      - goldenkey 3y ago
        Taps "Time Walk" and pulls out Jon Finkel's Tinker deck
- Doctor_Fegg 3y ago
  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)
3y ago

tomrod 3y ago

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.

jokethrowaway 3y ago

I like the old color tone better - but Google Maps has been going downhill since 2014-15

gramakri2 3y ago

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.

SushiHippie 3y ago
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"

jug 3y ago

Is it a competition at Google on who can come up with the brightest and lowest contrast map colors? Maybe it’s like a rite of passage… This is also how a map could look: https://postimg.cc/fVZvw8qJ https://postimg.cc/fVZvw8qJ

darkclouds 3y ago
[dead]
dorkwood 3y ago
Main roads and buildings are both yellow? It would be better to make one of them purple or something.
Daneel_ 3y ago
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! https://www.mapsbookstravelguides.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/perth_sd_ubd_sample-14.jpg https://www.mapsbookstravelguides.com.au/wp-content/uploads/... https://www.mapsbookstravelguides.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/south_west_wa_sd_ubd_sample-7.jpg https://www.mapsbookstravelguides.com.au/wp-content/uploads/...
- Izkata 3y ago
  The CTA (Chicago public transportation) has maps like these up at every train station and every sheltered bus stop: https://www.transitchicago.com/maps/downtown/ https://www.transitchicago.com/maps/downtown/
- amf12 3y ago
  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.
amf12 3y ago
The colors are a bit too bright for my taste. Also not color-blind friendly.

scyzoryk_xyz 3y ago

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”.

nostrebored 3y ago
Anecdotally I’m way more likely to care about a grocery than any of the locations you’ve mentioned. The goal isn’t creating a historical representation of where things were. It’s supposed to be functional.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  > 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.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > A subtle dark pattern that Google uses is that they have roughly one size of POI How many useful sizes could they have on a phone? > the profit motive (pay for prominence) Can you pay for this?
    - 15kingben 3y ago
      > Can you pay for this? Yes - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9934637?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9934637?hl=en

megous 3y ago

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.

iainmerrick 3y ago
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.
CogitoCogito 3y ago
> 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.

awongh 3y ago

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.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
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.
- korm 3y ago
  Search: "pizza", filters: 4.5+ star rating. 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.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
    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.
mechhacker 3y ago
They keep breaking zoom too. 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.

nostrebored 3y ago

Are we using different apps? 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.

akarlsten 3y ago

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!

hackerman_fi 3y ago

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.

robertlagrant 3y ago
Yes - the fact that the suggestion removed the useful words for people who don't interpret samey symbols all day spoke volumes.
globular-toast 3y ago
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.

phmqk76 3y ago

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.

Obscurity4340 3y ago
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
- freediver 3y ago
  If you select Kagi Search in Orion, you should have the option to enter your token.
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    I meant like I do that all the time but ill be damned if i have to "log in" to use my broswer lol
Cyberdog 3y ago
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.
nicoburns 3y ago
> On a side note, I haven’t found an easy way to use Google search logged out, but have a Gmail tab open Firefox container tabs are ideal for this kind of thing

gerdesj 3y ago

I suggest it is wrong or even dangerous to plot unauthenticated sites. For example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9465831,-2.6376033,18.96z?entry=ttu 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/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu 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

nomy99 3y ago

I like the new update and I think author needs to let her cynicism aside and focus on the fact that a product revitalization is almost always due.

werdnapk 3y ago
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.
- quitit 3y ago
  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. However there are examples of the night mode driving directions having unintuitive colours: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/17yv4qp/google_maps_has_updated/ 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.)
qwertox 3y ago
I disklike it. It looks dead. It might be better for driving, but not so for things dealing with nature. Also I get the feeling that smaller streets disappeared, forcing me to enable the cycling mode.
izacus 3y ago
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.

Obscurity4340 3y ago

What do you think about MagicEarth?

shaicoleman 3y ago

The new version doesn't show most of the street names. Not even the major roads. Screenshot: https://i.ibb.co/qszKNSm/google-maps-labels.png https://i.ibb.co/qszKNSm/google-maps-labels.png Example URL: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5041929,-0.111821,17.46z https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5041929,-0.111821,17.46z

kazinator 3y ago
I've noticed that. I zoom and zoom and zoom, yet the street name is not appearing! 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?
- ryandrake 3y ago
  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.
  - pests 3y ago
    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.
  - CogitoCogito 3y ago
    > 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”?

tokai 3y ago

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.

wsc981 3y ago

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 ...

Cyberdog 3y ago
Why not just use the Mail app to access your Gmail account and bypass the inferior web interface altogether?
- wsc981 3y 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.
- whitten 3y ago
  Some of us think that the mail app is the inferior. Search on the app uses my phone’s cpu. search on the web site uses their cpu. Guess which is faster ?
zelos 3y ago

120bits 3y ago

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.

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

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

drpixie 3y ago
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!

pentagrama 3y ago

A bit off topic but I didn't know that on X people can post this long form texts with images in between (it seems that lacks headings). Is nice! A blogging experience added to a popular platform. I guess is a paid feature, fair to me. Also I don't have an account and I'm able to read it. Some years ago I appreciated the character limit of Twitter because people have to be creative and to the point to express themselves, but with the years I start to thinking that this limitation was also a curse for communication overall on the platform.

legostormtroopr 3y ago
> the years I start to thinking that this limitation was also a curse for communication overall on the platform I would say the popularity of Twitter and its 140 character limit were a curse for communication fullstop. Globally, and irreversibly. Facebook gets a lot of flak for being an echo chamber with targetted ads and disinformation, but Twitter never got the same level of critique in damaging online discourse. Twitter specifically required people for a long time not to have long well-thought out ideas - but require hot takes and nothing else. Every political, social or economic position that was discussed had to be distilled to 140 characters - this effectively scrubbed nuance from any position. Along with retweets, this meant that all news, and all online discourse was reduced to "the hottest takes" without any level of complex thought.
- astrange 3y ago
  Twitter is probably relatively most popular in Japan, and 140 characters is not a problem in Japanese, so this wouldn't be a global issue. I think they doubled it to 280 forever ago anyway.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I absolutely hate this post. It's reasonably well structured because the author really cared & clearly spent time structuring it. But having a bunch of smaller posts comprising a thread would be much better blocking for me. I don't log in, so I can't read the comments, but it also is sorely missed that I can't see people reply to specific ideas or comments. It's all just a soupy unstructured mess. We already had blogs. Why we'd take a medium built for interaction & turn it into a place for long winded things that should be articles or blogs doesn't make sense to me.

contingencies 3y ago

Well, star me a flag, and export me a geolayer! Want to go here! Search this area! And by "layers", I mean satellite! Everyone: rush, to the beige! Contrast is too PC! An Apple a day! Let's speak in tones!

rajbot 3y ago

""" Here’s how it could look: - Keep the search box - Keep the bottom bar - Remove everything else from the map """ If you followed these suggestions you would end up with something that looks very much like Apple Maps

stathibus 3y ago
Google has still not recovered from the internal cultural disaster that was material design.
DHPersonal 3y ago
The Apple Maps UI is so much better than Google Maps.

sergiotapia 3y ago

At night the design choices are really bad. The active route and the alternate routes look so close in hex color, it's made me drive through the wrong wrong twice in the last few days. Example: https://twitter.com/chinmaymaps/status/1725752799944663443/photo/1 https://twitter.com/chinmaymaps/status/1725752799944663443/p... You may think it's easy to differentiate in the screenshot, but look at it on a small phone screen at night while driving. I hope Google changes this

pimlottc 3y ago
I’m confused, I don’t see any alternate routes in that screenshot?

wodenokoto 3y ago

Don't remove the text from the icons. I have no idea what the proposed buttons do, and since the icons changed i can't even reference the bad design. But i agree on the colors. It is just not nice to look at.

saewitz 3y ago

Recommend justinobeirne.com if you are interested in this kind of stuff.

abanayev 3y ago

I love the ideas but when did Xs/tweets become so long?

SPBS 3y ago
Everyone who you see posting tweets longer 280 characters is paying for the premium subscription, which leads me to believe X might actually be more successful (more sustainable?) than old Twitter in terms of monetization.

summerlight 3y ago

This particular color change is not very popular inside Google during its dogfooding and received lots of feedback, but yet the product team decided to push this. I don't know what happened in the team internally, but it looks like now those product people care less and less about internal feedback from arguably most enthusiastic users.

spankalee 3y ago
That sounds like most internal feedback since Google+
harryVic 3y ago
It's completely wild to me that the maps org has more than 10,000 people.
- michaelt 3y ago
  If they were just developing software that would be way too many, sure. But if you count streetview car drivers trying to drive every street in the entire world every few years, people manually moderating crowdsourced contributions, people updating the map for all new construction worldwide, people working to maintain business listings for every business with a physical location (including those without much web presence), people dealing with adversaries who want to list their fake '24 hour emergency locksmith' all over every city, people parsing train and bus timetables in every city worldwide no matter how awful their websites are, an advertising sales team specifically targeting smaller businesses who are interested in local advertising...
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Nokia Maps (I used to work there) when they acquired Navteq back in 2006 or so was something like 7000 people or so, most of them in Navteq. Navteq had employees and people in most countries in the world to be able to gather mapping data and work with local authorities. It's now called Here and they still have 9000 employees or so (in 2019 according to wikipedia). That's after years of decline and layoffs. The Navteq acquisition is what prompted Google to create their own maps. They were licensing Teleatlas (now Tom Tom) and Navteq maps before that. Apple made the same move a few years later. I think Steve Jobs was still around. I bet Apple has a few thousand people working on this topic as well. That's just what it takes to build and maintain a world map and assorted geospatial technologies, datasets, etc.

hnbalsamicw 3y ago

It's only after reading the post do i realize how shitty and cluttered the UI has become.

mepiethree 3y ago

I think the widgets are important. One of the primary ways I use Google maps is to punch in new directions quickly while at a red light or something. I want to press one button. The “home” and “gas” buttons help here. I certainly do not want features “buried” in the app where I need to tap more things frantically. I think the map is the most important thing, and the current design reflects this, but it isn’t SO important that everything else should go away. I don’t really care what a designer from 15 years ago thinks. The current designers do a good job.

jamespo 3y ago
So you break the law using your phone while driving (depending on jurisdiction).
- dannyw 3y ago
  At least in my jurisdiction (NSW, Aus), you can use and interact with navigational tools while driving.
globular-toast 3y ago
So you're just aimlessly driving around somewhere unfamiliar and suddenly think "I want to go home!"?
- mike_d 3y ago
  Yes. You've gotten out of the underground parking garage, have good GPS/cell signal again, and want to go home. Even when I know exactly where I am going and the route I want to use i'll often map it anyways so I can find out about traffic or accidents ahead.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > i'll often map it anyways so I can find out about traffic or accidents ahead. You mean doing the very thing Google Maps sucks at - i.e. being a map?

throwaway290 3y ago

Meanwhile, bugs galore. Since last month, any time I am looking at Google Maps, the podcast or music playing in the background will stop every few seconds. Not with navigation directions or review open, simply looking at the map it just grabs exclusive control of iOS audio for some unfathomable reason and plays nothing. Add to this the years old issue with inability to remove hundreds of old starred places. You can remove them using the app, you can go to starred list in web GUI and do it from there, but they all come back. But yeah, someone decided it was worthwhile to spend the time on the damned color change. GMaps still have strong points, like all the integrations that result in mostly correct regarding public transportation routes around the world or the review system which I am sure is a pain to keep up with the amount of UGC they're getting.

fallingfrog 3y ago

Is the teal maybe some kind of color blindness friendly feature? Or just 90’s nostalgia

c0pium 3y ago

The author wants to make google maps pretty and less usable. Minimalist software looks nice, but it is always at the cost of usability and especially discoverability. I don’t actually want to see a map when I open a maps app, I want to know where I can get coffee. The pills are amazing for that. Make the software you get paid for functional, and try to win awards with side projects nobody but the committee cares about.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

onetokeoverthe 3y ago

[dead]

coolgoose 3y ago

I am happy it's not just grumpy man sindrom for me regarding this change. I do find the new map colors distracting for no reason

guappa 3y ago
I've disabled auto updates on the phone a long time ago. I occasionally update the webview thing to hopefully not get hacked (doesn't matter much, samsung isn't diligent with the base system anyway). I noticed that when apps get updated usually it is to move around all the buttons and add ads, so unless they stop working there is hardly reason to update in my opinion.

shanghaikid 3y ago

Thank you for the greate product design.

Symbiote 3y ago

I recently had a problem with data on my phone, so part way through a long car trip I had to use OSMAnd over Android Auto. Normally I only use that when hiking. It was wonderful! All the roads had high contrast with the background, so in a dense and unfamiliar city "in 500m turn left onto Smith Street" was so much easier! With a brief glance at the screen I could see how many streets there were, and they were labelled with their names. It isn't perfect, but it showed how bad Google Maps had become. I used it for the rest of the trip. Google had white-on-beige for streets, so the displayed map was essentially useless. The new colours look like a small improvement. Edit: I tried to find a screenshot of OSMAnd, but nothing looks like what I saw in the car. I don't have a car to check, it was only a rental. Maybe it was like this picture in the documentation: https://osmand.net/docs/user/navigation/auto-car/#map-appearance https://osmand.net/docs/user/navigation/auto-car/#map-appear... but I thought I had it in light mode too.

frereubu 3y ago

To try and remove myself from Google as much as possible I've been trying Apple Maps again after previous bad experiences, and much prefer it now. The only exception is place information, including opening hours etc, for which Google is much better. I'm pretty sure the difference is to do with incentives, where Apple isn't trying to sell ads in Maps. That seems to have lead to things in Google Maps like location pins outcompeting basic information like road names, which doesn't happen in Apple Maps. There's clearly a trade-off there, that I think Google has started to get very wrong. For what it's worth I also don't like the new colours. I guess people will get used to it after a while, but I question the wisdom of a change like that in a situation where colours have meaning - there should be a very good reason for that kind of change, and I haven't seen anything to back that up. If anything the opposite where, for example, route information is harder to see in dark mode.

wanderingmind 3y ago
OsmAnd is fantastic if you are looking for a Google Maps replacement and much better at navigation especially for biking and walking
- jwestbury 3y ago
  If you're in a city which supports it, the best non-driving maps app is CityMapper. So, so, so much better at public transportation and blended trips.

theanonymousone 3y ago

In every discussion about Google Maps, I feel obliged to mention that it does not show speed limits in Switzerland, despite the official support page[0] saying otherwise! Isn't this insanely beautiful/ridiculous that nobody seems to care? [0] https://developers.google.com/maps/coverage https://developers.google.com/maps/coverage

CommonGuy 3y ago
It shows the speed limit for me (I'm Swiss). Not sure if only on selected streets or everywhere.
- theanonymousone 3y ago
  Are you in a big city? For me speed limits appear the moment I cross the border to Italy or get off the plane in UK, but never in Switzerland (or Germany where I have also checked it). I have the setting enabled and everything.
izacus 3y ago
Speed limits have started showing up for me in Switzerland in last few months, so it seems like something is moving. Having said that, they're commonly hillariously wrong. No, I don't think those tight mountain roads have limit of 80 (especially after just driving past a 50 sign :P).

aeyes 3y ago

Remember how Maps marks walkable centric areas of interest in yellow? It's now almost indistinguishable from the normal building colors, in the sun on your phone you definitely can't make out the difference. I was in a new city last week where this feature would have been useful to explore the city center but I just wasn't able to see it.

TonyTrapp 3y ago

Even before the current design change, it was almost impossible for me to navigate using Google Maps. With OpenStreetMap, it's easy for me to extract the features of my surroundings: - The shape and size of houses. Yes, you can see individual buildings in Google Maps, but they are almost indistinguishable from the background. - It tells me at a glance whether some area is a forest or just a field. Everything's just the same color in Google Maps. - Streets that I should probably not set a foot on (highways) have a distinct color. This is really bad now with the redesign. - No problem figuring out if an area is serviced by trams or trains, you see their tracks clearly and don't need to zoom in looking for individual stations. Again you can extract this information from Google Maps if you squint, but tram tracks next to streets are almost invisible. Especially with this update, prominent colors are given only to streets, which may make sense if you use Google Maps in your car. But as a pedestrian or cyclist, all the other information about my surroundings is much more important to me.

widerporst 3y ago
>It tells me at a glance whether some area is a forest or just a field. Everything's just the same color in Google Maps. Thank you. Everyone is talking about the color of the water or the roads, but this doesn't even bother me. But having all vegetation of any kind in the same color is an absolutely mind-bogglingly stupid decision. I can't be the only one who uses Maps to check the extents of a forest, for example. Or who uses shapes of different land uses to quickly orient oneself on a map.
- andromeduck 3y ago
  Yeah, it's quite clear the designers have never lived outside lived of a car sewer. Every justification they've given thus far circle back to contrast for road features and while driving. It's peak car brain.
  - 4wsn 3y ago
    Car sewer? Car brain? Wow, didn't know we had zealotry and disparagement over _choice of transport_ of all things, generally a matter people have little choice in; it's determined by where you live and what sort of life you have.

ssijak 3y ago

I love the update, love the widgets on the screen and love the new colors.

retrocryptid 3y ago

In 2009 I had extensive conversations with the design team. The scale device is a critical feature for people who want to use the maps app as a map. Google's response to it's removal then was they expected people only use the maps app as a "background upon to place directions." That's why they only display major street names, only display ranges in the context of directions and keep removing the scale device. It's not a map application, it's a wayfinder.

tjbiddle 3y ago

My biggest gripe is trying to read road names. So many times I'll see a road name, and I start to zoom in - only to have it now disappear - to then zoom out again and it doesn't show at all - to zoom in again and then 50/50 I can see it. Drives me nuts. Where I'm living (Indonesia) most people reference parts of town by the major road nearby. I try to learn where the hell I am in a certain new locale by looking at the road name (They aren't often seen on physical signs, either) and it takes me forever to find it. Doesn't help that it's a regular practice that the road name changes after some time, even though it's the same road.

nzealand 3y ago
Drop a pin. It sucks. I know.
- k8svet 3y ago
  This is one of those comments I'll think about hundreds of times, followed by remembering how dumb I feel right now, that this has never occurred to me. Thanks for the tip.
rjh29 3y ago
That happens for businesses too, it's maddening!
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Yeah, I zoom in all the way to a building I know is a business to look up opening times etc, but the name just doesn't appear. I don't get it.
  - alexjurkiewicz 3y ago
    Now they can sell advertising to businesses and guarantee improved CTR.
tzfld 3y ago
The same with contour line elevations. They are unreadably small, and when zooming in enough they just disappear. Hate it.

wolpoli 3y ago

It seems that every element is now pill shaped. What went wrong with rectangles with slightly rounded corners? Are they going to get the top and bottom curved out as well and give us oval next?

eviks 3y ago

The huge missing part is customization : give users easy as stable way to clean up your garbage, and you wouldn't need to wait 15 years to complaint about obvious UI design fails

phgn 3y ago

Seems like the Maps team want us to know that they still exist?

grey_earthling 3y ago

Now would be a good moment for OpenStreetMap to make the Tracestrack Topo layer their default view — it's much clearer than their current default; even more so when compared to Google's attempt. => https://www.openstreetmap.org/?layers=P https://www.openstreetmap.org/?layers=P

RicoElectrico 3y ago
Won't happen as the default layer has mapper feedback as one of the explicit goals.
- executesorder66 3y ago
  How does that layer hinder mapper feedback if it becomes the default?
  - habi 3y ago
    The current default layer [1] has a short 'turnaround' time, meaning that changed tiles are quickly rendered, giving very short feedback time. The Tracestrack Topo is provided by a third party, without explicitly stated re-rendering turnaround times. [1]: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto
habi 3y ago
> As far as I can tell, Tracestrack’s style is currently a closed-source style, which makes it an unlikely candidate for a default layer. See https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/osm-carto-maintainers-refusing-to-render-approved-highway-busway/103289/93 https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/osm-carto-maintainers-... for a bit of discussion on this on the OSM community Forum.

janalsncm 3y ago

> The map should be sacred real estate. Only things that are highly useful to many people should obscure it. This got me thinking. It would be neat if apps could adapt their UI to the features I use the most. Not what most people use. What I use. Rather than finding the UI that pleases the largest number of people somewhat, create adaptive UIs that fit my usage patterns at a highly granular level.

walteweiss 3y ago
I was thinking the same thought like 10 years ago, and I even forgot I had the idea back then. And now with all the other (especially hardware) enhancements — which I think is way more complicated! — I’m surprised it’s not a reality these days. I am sure this is the Way.

xinayder 3y ago

As I wrote on the other discussion for this same tweet: I don't see how the color scheme change helps with accessibility and readability. Okay, maybe the contrast with road names was bad before, but the major point was that important roads (like avenues) were highlighted in YELLOW. Now every road is the same color and you can't distinguish between important and secondary roads. They sacrificed usability for "readability". They could've achieved a mix of both (maybe change/increase street name?), change the font color, but the issues still remain. You must zoom in to see a road name and it doesn't work most of the times.

piva00 3y ago

The parks, forests, fields, and woodlands around me now are all the same colour. At least to my eyes it's just a sea of mint-coloured blobs with no distinction whatsoever... I don't see a single improvement with the new colour scheme, the lack of contrast also makes the built area around me almost fade into the mint-coloured blobs.

mkii 3y ago

Anyone else notice how Google Maps has indexed everyone's covid cottage industry LLC registration? It's like I can't view any neighborhood around me now without people's random consultancy, auto repair hobby, travel agent gig, Etsy store, etc. cluttering up the map! Super annoying!

gniv 3y ago
Yes, very annoying. But I suspect it's the business owners that add them. If you see stuff that's online only (shopping sites) I think it's fair to report them.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

robbywashere_ 3y ago

[flagged]

Luddberg 3y ago
This is an almost word-for-word rewording of tjbiddle‘s post (first reply at the moment). Why?
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  what a bizzare mystery! I wonder if they're trying to test a karma farming algorithm for later influence peddling/manipulation.
dang 3y ago
You can't do this here, and I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use HN as intended in the future.

causality0 3y ago

Does he have any pull with the current team? Because God damn, the new color scheme is hard to read. It's so low-contrast all the roads and grass and water look like one big aqua smear. For me Google Maps has sucked ever since they merged Maps and Navigate into a single app, preventing you from using many Maps functions while navigating somewhere.

kuon 3y ago

In Switzerland with have the swisstopo map which is really good in term of readability. I often refer to it to explain what a good map is.

RugnirViking 3y ago
Same in UK with Ordnance survey ! Maps that actually let one navigate the world, rather than only via roads

orloffm 3y ago

When I read comments to posts like this, what amazes me is the level of denial people have about huge corporations. It's just not possible to do a rework like that, there is no one who can decide on that, no one who knows exactly what strings have to be pushed (all the platforms, all the teams, all the application layers, all the documentation/PR/support layers), no one who has time in daily work to see it all through, no one who can take responsibility if revenue slightly dips, no one who can approve this and take responsibility if the guy who has the plan in mind quits, etc. Sure, some high-level manager has formal power to force this, but how will he or she make sure it happens exactly?

RicoElectrico 3y ago

If you don't rely heavily on car navigation (sorry, no live traffic) then give Organic Maps (https://organicmaps.app https://organicmaps.app) a try. I think Google Maps mess is partially due to PMs beholden to some OKRs. Stepping back a bit I wonder how much inconvenience do these people inflict upon us. Think about it. You rolled out a mobile app for a business/device/whatever. Best way to boost installs and impress your manager? Artificially gate features behind it.

nojvek 3y ago

I wish open street maps had vectorized maps instead of the tiled images. Google maps is in need of real competition. It feels stagnant and regressing over time.

dalkvist 3y ago
Several companies have osm vector tiles, mapbox among them. Osm.org isn't really for end-users, the focus is on mappers.

xwowsersx 3y ago

I quite like the new colors. Not the ones for the roads, but the softer greens etc are just much easier on the eyes

getpost 3y ago

I see lots of complaints about street names not rendering, and that has been a problem for me as well. The tweet author has a separate thread about how India doesn't routinely have street names, and how that lead to a design change for maps. It's super interesting! https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1719379064564166772 https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1719379064564166772 EDIT: The following link is among the replies in that Twitter thread. Anatomy of an Indian Address [50th Edition] [AUG 7, 2023] https://newsletter.theindianotes.com/p/anatomy-of-an-indian-address https://newsletter.theindianotes.com/p/anatomy-of-an-indian-...