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Is this where we get to complain about how horrible Google Maps suddenly is? Because wow. I can speak about this. It's terrible. First and foremost, and they h

Is this where we get to complain about how horrible Google Maps suddenly is? Because wow. I can speak about this. It's terrible. First and foremost, and they have their "reasons" of course, but my Samsung Rant (yeah just a feature phone) always had great maps. Just a simple Java app, built on the maps API. Well that doesn't work anymore. Like, nothing. Google basically says "Get an Android phone, sucker." F U Google. Is what I think of that. Secondly, the desktop (and basically the tablet experience too is the same) has gotten terrible. It takes a really long time before my mouse event matters. By this time, the screen, since it's still resolving and moving things around the canvas or whatever the hell it's doing, well by the time my mouse event registers, the object I wanted has moved away. I'm now doing something else! Directions. Just so retarded. The accordion shit on the left. Just show me the effing directions, like you used to. I don't want to tab around a widget in the upper left. Plus you have toggle it open in the first place, and it's not very responsive, either. Also, just simple double-clicking to zoom. Extremely less useful than it used to be: just this one simple thing. I could go on. How awful. What happened?

solutionyogi 12y ago
Completely agree. On my workstation (6 cores + 32 GB RAM), Google Maps is unbearably slow using the Chrome browser. I can not even imagine the performance on an average computer. My second biggest pet peeve: In old Maps, clicking on the marker will bring out a popup providing you various choices (http://imgur.com/qeLhJSd http://imgur.com/qeLhJSd). In new Maps, clicking on the marker centers it on the screen. What the F? What's the value add in bringing the marker to center when I click it? Just like GMail, Maps has gone from being great software to mediocre. I don't know who is making these horrible design choices at Googleplex.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- pgrote 12y ago
  Here is the thing ... the clicking on a point on the math and getting info was a great feature. I loved it. I am also sure that there is no way Google simply removed it. But they did. The closest I can find is RIGHT CLICK/WHAT'S HERE.
  - darren_ 12y ago
    really? clicking the map on desktop maps should do the same thing as right-click->whats-here. it does for me anyway.
    - pgrote 12y ago
      What is your environment? I am on Windows 7 and Chrome 34.0.1847.131 m.
      - ceras 12y ago
        Not who you were replying to, but a simple left-click for "what's here?" works for me on a Chromebook running Chrome 33.0.1750.152
      - Nullabillity 12y ago
        Fine for me, Chrome 34.0.1847.132 on Ubuntu 14.04 with KDE.
  - ceph_ 12y ago
    Clicking a location in the new maps bring up location info under the search bar. At least for me. http://i.imgur.com/j3uchwW.png http://i.imgur.com/j3uchwW.png
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
adventured 12y ago
They fixed something that wasn't broken. Classic screw-up.
- pgrote 12y ago
  I don't mind new things, but the way they went about changing maps was an overhaul instead of incremental. I even gave feedback during the trial period as they asked. Never heard anything on it.
Pacabel 12y ago
What you're saying is absolutely correct. I actually had to use Bing Maps today to look up some directions because the new version of Google Maps was pretty much unusable. As for why UX disasters like this can happen, I think it generally comes down to one thing these days: "hipsters". Those of us who've been in industry for a long time have no doubt seen this happen before. A relatively well-established product has a usable UI. It isn't perfect, and maybe even looks "dated" in some ways, but it generally works and is understood by its existing users. So-called "hipsters" (that is, people who have an uncompromising view that they're talented "designers" or "UI experts", with a massive ego to back this up, and a fixation on being "trendy") get involved at some point. These people are often relatively young, often have limited experience, and are usually more focused on making designs look "pretty" and "modern" rather than usable. Needing to create work for themselves, these hipsters, coupled with managers who need to appear to be leading something seen as "productive", start on a UI redesign. Often this is done without the involvement or insight offered by the existing developers of the product, nor any of the product's users. Changes are made purely to look "better", with limited to no consideration of how it'll impact the usability of the product. The end result is a total cock-up like this, or like the poor UI of Chrome (and the imitations of it by Firefox, Opera and IE), or a project-killing release like GNOME 3, or an abysmal failure like Windows 8. UIs were generally far more usable in the 1980s, 1990s, and the first half of the 2000s, before "hipsters" got involved with design. What we see today is a total jumble of inconsistent and incoherent UI design, where usability and efficiency are considered significantly less important than "looking trendy".
- chrisrhoden 12y ago
  So, in other words, kids these days?
  - Pacabel 12y ago
    No, not at all. It isn't really about age. I've dealt with "hipsters" in their 40s and 50s who've come up with very bad UI designs. Likewise, many of the managers or executives advocating for these redesigns are in their 30s, 40s or even 50s. While it may be more of an issue with younger people due to a greater lack of experience and intuition, it's a phenomenon that's quite independent of age.
cliveowen 12y ago
Just yesterday I realized that they removed the estimate of fuel costs. Why? That doesn't make sense, it's one of the things you expect to see when you search for directions. It's backwards, but they managed to "update" a product and render it less useful.
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  Less is more, right? Right?!?
- Nullabillity 12y ago
  Aren't fuel costs local enough that trying to estimate it is futile anyway?
3327 12y ago
I have a four letter word B I N G. Bing maps is surprisingly good and i switched after being fed up with the disaster UI. Pulling my hair out no more !
yen223 12y ago
Let me be contrarian here. I really like Google Map's redesign. I have an iPhone 4, still running iOS 6. The Google Maps app has one of the best user experience I have on my phone, hands down. Turn-by-turn navigation works flawlessly. Traffic information is almost real-time, no doubt thanks to their acquisition of Waze. The app gets the little things right as well - like displaying alternate routes, along with a time estimation, directly on the map itself during navigation. As for the desktop website, I really have no idea what you're talking about. Maps still feels pretty smooth - and I use a MacBook Air. I like the fact that they removed a lot of cruft so that you can see more of the, well, map.
- simonswords82 12y ago
  Ditto, I've never had issue with it, driven all around the UK directed by Google maps in navigation mode and apart from the odd postcode fail it's been incredibly reliable in getting me from A to B.
- joosters 12y ago
  The iOS Google maps navigation is unreliable for me. Several times, it's shown me an icon indicating a left turn while the audio tells me to turn right. Plus the app doesn't really cope well with roundabouts, which in my country is a big problem! I'm hoping that they improve maps using their acquisition of Waze, rather than abandoning that app...
bsg75 12y ago
> What happened? Apple Maps became useful again (for us iOS users)
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Secondly, the desktop (and basically the tablet experience too is the same) has gotten terrible. It takes a really long time before my mouse event matters. By this time, the screen, since it's still resolving and moving things around the canvas or whatever the hell it's doing, well by the time my mouse event registers, the object I wanted has moved away. I'm now doing something else! Even though it does more, I've noticed maps is faster on desktop for me than it used to be, and I'm not using particularly high-powered machines. But the older one has a fairly decent (if by no means current) ATI graphics card and the one with integrated Intel graphics is a fairly new laptop, so if GPU rendering is involved (WebGL or otherwise) even relative old-new performance could be very system dependent. > Directions. Just so retarded. The accordion shit on the left. Just show me the effing directions, like you used to. It is one more click to do that, OTOH the reason is that it provides several alternate routes (with on-map preview), to start with, plus makes the route options + multiple destination routing UIs available. Personally, I find the new UI much more useful than the old one. > Also, just simple double-clicking to zoom. Extremely less useful than it used to be: just this one simple thing. Is your complaint that you don't have drag to zoom any more? That's true, but then, if you are a keyboard user (which your complaint about tabbing around the directions UI suggests), you can use +/- to zoom, in addition to double-clicking.
- Crito 12y ago
  The other day I was comparing which cities had which fast food restaurants, and how many. I zoomed in to Philadelphia and searched for "Wendies" (yes, misspelled). I suddenly found myself looking at the address of an unrelated store in Trenton, NJ. I tried it again, and it worked as expected. I don't know what they have done to the search in maps, but that sort of thing has been happening to me frequently these days with that product. It is almost never consistent, perhaps relying on the exact zoom and position, or perhaps correcting itself when correct results hit the cache.. I don't really know. It's inconsistency makes me think that I am losing my mind sometimes. What I am sure of is that something is rotten in the state of Google Maps.
- joel_perl_prog 12y ago
  Just gonna jump to your last thing. No, my complaint is not about drag to zoom. It's about double-click to zoom (the words I used, but I know sometimes things can be looked as maybe just an expression or sloppy language). Double-click. Literally. Click, click. Zoom. This no longer works correctly. Much of the time, instead of zooming, well... it does something else, I honestly can't remember what. Maybe opens a little dialog about a business it thinks you clicked on or something. Anyway. Seriously bad. There is a way to have our cake and eat, too, to address the general tone of your comment (where you highlight the explanations and the intended benefits), but Google Maps, today, is NOT the way forward. It sucks.
bluecalm 12y ago
Google somehow manages to make UI's worse and worse as the time progresses. Gtalk was nice, was turned into unusable mess which is Hangouts. Youtube got worse with comments and annoying force feeding of real name policy. Maps got way worse after the recent upgrade for reasons you described. GMail as well made some anti-user changes (like for example being unable to log-in from different account if there is a cookie from previous login but also some choices in inbox itself). I wonder if there is some evil UI design department within Google because they are very consistent at messing up once good and user friendly services.
- krsunny 12y ago
  Google has ruined maps on my Android. So much so that I have reverted it back to original factory version since thats the version which had the single most useful feature of the app - the ability to add what you searched for to your contacts in one press. The number of times they have changed the UI around is ridiculous. I know Im not supposed to be fiddling with my phone while Im driving but if I ever crash its probably because once again Google changed the fucking UI again and I have to figure it out whilst en route.
- eropple 12y ago
  What's unusable about Hangouts? I think it's a better experience on both mobile and web. And Adium still works just fine with it for person-to-person IM.
  - markbnj 12y ago
    I find it a mess, personally, at least on the desktop. I have no real complaints about the mobile version.
  - bluecalm 12y ago
    It loses messages all the time. It also sometimes pastes fragments of old messages in the middle of the conversatation Two things GTalk never got wrong which are pretty crucial for messaging service. The UI.. it was a total mess when they introduced it (lack of statutes, difficult to see who is available etc.) but those I have to admit improved recently.
michael_nielsen 12y ago
I switched to Bing Maps a month or so ago. It's not as good as the old Google Maps -- there's less detailed information -- but at least the basic functionality works. Can't say that for the new Google Maps.
sliverstorm 12y ago
I could go on. How awful. What happened? My guess? The new Maps was developed by people who use exclusively quad Xeons with 32GB of RAM and perhaps a high-end workstation graphics card. (i.e., highly paid developers at a wealthy company) It's not an uncommon problem. Developers work on high-end hardware whenever they can, and rightly so, but it can cause issues with targeting.
flatline 12y ago
The quality of their directions has gone downhill as well. I keep getting routes that take me needlessly onto a frontage road and back to the main road; that say there's a hard right when there's a slight jog in the road; that have me take take a right and three lefts instead of just going straight and turning left, when there is an abundantly clear left-turn lane; the list goes on and on. When it first started it wasn't so great at directions, and they improved it dramatically over the next few years. Now it's back to sucking pretty badly.
mnicky 12y ago
This is exactly why I started to use basic html version of Gmail on my desktop computer. It provides almost anything I need (well, that is to write emails and reply to them), it's fast and responsive (no, not that responsive, just that it actually responds to my mouse events ;). From time to time when I need someting more than basic email stuff, I use the standard javascript interface... Try it for yourself: http://mail.google.com?ui=html http://mail.google.com?ui=html :)
georgemcbay 12y ago
Google Maps has forsaken even Android users, so switching to Android is probably not your solution, unless you also downgrade the maps app to the last 6.x release after going Android. They did a total graphic and UX redesign of the Android app between 6.x and 7.x that made the app pretty horrible to use -- essentially they made it prettier but a LOT less useful as a gps navigation app. You now have to click like 5-7 times to do things that would require 2 or so clicks to accomplish before, which is a huge deal for a GPS app that you just want to dial in and go with, the overhead view is all fucked up now, they also introduced a ton of bugs in the initial 7.x versions -- some of them are now fixed, but it still isn't as rock solid as 6.x was, and they removed a ton of useful features. bleh, don't get me started on the downfall of Google Maps... whatever change happened over there in their focus as of about 1.5 years ago has been an ongoing travesty, which I think is a huge problem for Android going forward since IMO Google Maps in the 6.x era was the absolute killer app for Android and what kept me not even looking at alternate phones. My next phone may very well be a Windows Phone, which is especially funny since I make a living writing Android apps.

solutionyogi 12y ago

Completely agree. On my workstation (6 cores + 32 GB RAM), Google Maps is unbearably slow using the Chrome browser. I can not even imagine the performance on an average computer. My second biggest pet peeve: In old Maps, clicking on the marker will bring out a popup providing you various choices (http://imgur.com/qeLhJSd http://imgur.com/qeLhJSd). In new Maps, clicking on the marker centers it on the screen. What the F? What's the value add in bringing the marker to center when I click it? Just like GMail, Maps has gone from being great software to mediocre. I don't know who is making these horrible design choices at Googleplex.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pgrote 12y ago
Here is the thing ... the clicking on a point on the math and getting info was a great feature. I loved it. I am also sure that there is no way Google simply removed it. But they did. The closest I can find is RIGHT CLICK/WHAT'S HERE.
- darren_ 12y ago
  really? clicking the map on desktop maps should do the same thing as right-click->whats-here. it does for me anyway.
  - pgrote 12y ago
    What is your environment? I am on Windows 7 and Chrome 34.0.1847.131 m.
    - ceras 12y ago
      Not who you were replying to, but a simple left-click for "what's here?" works for me on a Chromebook running Chrome 33.0.1750.152
    - Nullabillity 12y ago
      Fine for me, Chrome 34.0.1847.132 on Ubuntu 14.04 with KDE.
- ceph_ 12y ago
  Clicking a location in the new maps bring up location info under the search bar. At least for me. http://i.imgur.com/j3uchwW.png http://i.imgur.com/j3uchwW.png
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

adventured 12y ago

They fixed something that wasn't broken. Classic screw-up.

pgrote 12y ago
I don't mind new things, but the way they went about changing maps was an overhaul instead of incremental. I even gave feedback during the trial period as they asked. Never heard anything on it.

Pacabel 12y ago

What you're saying is absolutely correct. I actually had to use Bing Maps today to look up some directions because the new version of Google Maps was pretty much unusable. As for why UX disasters like this can happen, I think it generally comes down to one thing these days: "hipsters". Those of us who've been in industry for a long time have no doubt seen this happen before. A relatively well-established product has a usable UI. It isn't perfect, and maybe even looks "dated" in some ways, but it generally works and is understood by its existing users. So-called "hipsters" (that is, people who have an uncompromising view that they're talented "designers" or "UI experts", with a massive ego to back this up, and a fixation on being "trendy") get involved at some point. These people are often relatively young, often have limited experience, and are usually more focused on making designs look "pretty" and "modern" rather than usable. Needing to create work for themselves, these hipsters, coupled with managers who need to appear to be leading something seen as "productive", start on a UI redesign. Often this is done without the involvement or insight offered by the existing developers of the product, nor any of the product's users. Changes are made purely to look "better", with limited to no consideration of how it'll impact the usability of the product. The end result is a total cock-up like this, or like the poor UI of Chrome (and the imitations of it by Firefox, Opera and IE), or a project-killing release like GNOME 3, or an abysmal failure like Windows 8. UIs were generally far more usable in the 1980s, 1990s, and the first half of the 2000s, before "hipsters" got involved with design. What we see today is a total jumble of inconsistent and incoherent UI design, where usability and efficiency are considered significantly less important than "looking trendy".

chrisrhoden 12y ago
So, in other words, kids these days?
- Pacabel 12y ago
  No, not at all. It isn't really about age. I've dealt with "hipsters" in their 40s and 50s who've come up with very bad UI designs. Likewise, many of the managers or executives advocating for these redesigns are in their 30s, 40s or even 50s. While it may be more of an issue with younger people due to a greater lack of experience and intuition, it's a phenomenon that's quite independent of age.

cliveowen 12y ago

Just yesterday I realized that they removed the estimate of fuel costs. Why? That doesn't make sense, it's one of the things you expect to see when you search for directions. It's backwards, but they managed to "update" a product and render it less useful.

enraged_camel 12y ago
Less is more, right? Right?!?
Nullabillity 12y ago
Aren't fuel costs local enough that trying to estimate it is futile anyway?

3327 12y ago

I have a four letter word B I N G. Bing maps is surprisingly good and i switched after being fed up with the disaster UI. Pulling my hair out no more !

yen223 12y ago

Let me be contrarian here. I really like Google Map's redesign. I have an iPhone 4, still running iOS 6. The Google Maps app has one of the best user experience I have on my phone, hands down. Turn-by-turn navigation works flawlessly. Traffic information is almost real-time, no doubt thanks to their acquisition of Waze. The app gets the little things right as well - like displaying alternate routes, along with a time estimation, directly on the map itself during navigation. As for the desktop website, I really have no idea what you're talking about. Maps still feels pretty smooth - and I use a MacBook Air. I like the fact that they removed a lot of cruft so that you can see more of the, well, map.

simonswords82 12y ago
Ditto, I've never had issue with it, driven all around the UK directed by Google maps in navigation mode and apart from the odd postcode fail it's been incredibly reliable in getting me from A to B.
joosters 12y ago
The iOS Google maps navigation is unreliable for me. Several times, it's shown me an icon indicating a left turn while the audio tells me to turn right. Plus the app doesn't really cope well with roundabouts, which in my country is a big problem! I'm hoping that they improve maps using their acquisition of Waze, rather than abandoning that app...

bsg75 12y ago

> What happened? Apple Maps became useful again (for us iOS users)

dragonwriter 12y ago

> Secondly, the desktop (and basically the tablet experience too is the same) has gotten terrible. It takes a really long time before my mouse event matters. By this time, the screen, since it's still resolving and moving things around the canvas or whatever the hell it's doing, well by the time my mouse event registers, the object I wanted has moved away. I'm now doing something else! Even though it does more, I've noticed maps is faster on desktop for me than it used to be, and I'm not using particularly high-powered machines. But the older one has a fairly decent (if by no means current) ATI graphics card and the one with integrated Intel graphics is a fairly new laptop, so if GPU rendering is involved (WebGL or otherwise) even relative old-new performance could be very system dependent. > Directions. Just so retarded. The accordion shit on the left. Just show me the effing directions, like you used to. It is one more click to do that, OTOH the reason is that it provides several alternate routes (with on-map preview), to start with, plus makes the route options + multiple destination routing UIs available. Personally, I find the new UI much more useful than the old one. > Also, just simple double-clicking to zoom. Extremely less useful than it used to be: just this one simple thing. Is your complaint that you don't have drag to zoom any more? That's true, but then, if you are a keyboard user (which your complaint about tabbing around the directions UI suggests), you can use +/- to zoom, in addition to double-clicking.

Crito 12y ago
The other day I was comparing which cities had which fast food restaurants, and how many. I zoomed in to Philadelphia and searched for "Wendies" (yes, misspelled). I suddenly found myself looking at the address of an unrelated store in Trenton, NJ. I tried it again, and it worked as expected. I don't know what they have done to the search in maps, but that sort of thing has been happening to me frequently these days with that product. It is almost never consistent, perhaps relying on the exact zoom and position, or perhaps correcting itself when correct results hit the cache.. I don't really know. It's inconsistency makes me think that I am losing my mind sometimes. What I am sure of is that something is rotten in the state of Google Maps.
joel_perl_prog 12y ago
Just gonna jump to your last thing. No, my complaint is not about drag to zoom. It's about double-click to zoom (the words I used, but I know sometimes things can be looked as maybe just an expression or sloppy language). Double-click. Literally. Click, click. Zoom. This no longer works correctly. Much of the time, instead of zooming, well... it does something else, I honestly can't remember what. Maybe opens a little dialog about a business it thinks you clicked on or something. Anyway. Seriously bad. There is a way to have our cake and eat, too, to address the general tone of your comment (where you highlight the explanations and the intended benefits), but Google Maps, today, is NOT the way forward. It sucks.

bluecalm 12y ago

Google somehow manages to make UI's worse and worse as the time progresses. Gtalk was nice, was turned into unusable mess which is Hangouts. Youtube got worse with comments and annoying force feeding of real name policy. Maps got way worse after the recent upgrade for reasons you described. GMail as well made some anti-user changes (like for example being unable to log-in from different account if there is a cookie from previous login but also some choices in inbox itself). I wonder if there is some evil UI design department within Google because they are very consistent at messing up once good and user friendly services.

krsunny 12y ago
Google has ruined maps on my Android. So much so that I have reverted it back to original factory version since thats the version which had the single most useful feature of the app - the ability to add what you searched for to your contacts in one press. The number of times they have changed the UI around is ridiculous. I know Im not supposed to be fiddling with my phone while Im driving but if I ever crash its probably because once again Google changed the fucking UI again and I have to figure it out whilst en route.
eropple 12y ago
What's unusable about Hangouts? I think it's a better experience on both mobile and web. And Adium still works just fine with it for person-to-person IM.
- markbnj 12y ago
  I find it a mess, personally, at least on the desktop. I have no real complaints about the mobile version.
- bluecalm 12y ago
  It loses messages all the time. It also sometimes pastes fragments of old messages in the middle of the conversatation Two things GTalk never got wrong which are pretty crucial for messaging service. The UI.. it was a total mess when they introduced it (lack of statutes, difficult to see who is available etc.) but those I have to admit improved recently.

michael_nielsen 12y ago

I switched to Bing Maps a month or so ago. It's not as good as the old Google Maps -- there's less detailed information -- but at least the basic functionality works. Can't say that for the new Google Maps.

sliverstorm 12y ago

I could go on. How awful. What happened? My guess? The new Maps was developed by people who use exclusively quad Xeons with 32GB of RAM and perhaps a high-end workstation graphics card. (i.e., highly paid developers at a wealthy company) It's not an uncommon problem. Developers work on high-end hardware whenever they can, and rightly so, but it can cause issues with targeting.

flatline 12y ago

The quality of their directions has gone downhill as well. I keep getting routes that take me needlessly onto a frontage road and back to the main road; that say there's a hard right when there's a slight jog in the road; that have me take take a right and three lefts instead of just going straight and turning left, when there is an abundantly clear left-turn lane; the list goes on and on. When it first started it wasn't so great at directions, and they improved it dramatically over the next few years. Now it's back to sucking pretty badly.

mnicky 12y ago

This is exactly why I started to use basic html version of Gmail on my desktop computer. It provides almost anything I need (well, that is to write emails and reply to them), it's fast and responsive (no, not that responsive, just that it actually responds to my mouse events ;). From time to time when I need someting more than basic email stuff, I use the standard javascript interface... Try it for yourself: http://mail.google.com?ui=html http://mail.google.com?ui=html :)

georgemcbay 12y ago

Google Maps has forsaken even Android users, so switching to Android is probably not your solution, unless you also downgrade the maps app to the last 6.x release after going Android. They did a total graphic and UX redesign of the Android app between 6.x and 7.x that made the app pretty horrible to use -- essentially they made it prettier but a LOT less useful as a gps navigation app. You now have to click like 5-7 times to do things that would require 2 or so clicks to accomplish before, which is a huge deal for a GPS app that you just want to dial in and go with, the overhead view is all fucked up now, they also introduced a ton of bugs in the initial 7.x versions -- some of them are now fixed, but it still isn't as rock solid as 6.x was, and they removed a ton of useful features. bleh, don't get me started on the downfall of Google Maps... whatever change happened over there in their focus as of about 1.5 years ago has been an ongoing travesty, which I think is a huge problem for Android going forward since IMO Google Maps in the 6.x era was the absolute killer app for Android and what kept me not even looking at alternate phones. My next phone may very well be a Windows Phone, which is especially funny since I make a living writing Android apps.