I'm confused by the replies saying that more dense labels would somehow harm usability for driving or navigation. When you're driving, you know where you're going, the map knows where you're going, and it's easy to see the route you need to take. When you're not on a route, denser labels help you to orient yourself with the map and to know when to zoom into a particular location.
That said, I also think the focus on paper maps is misplaced. Old-style road maps had to answer the question, "how do I get there from here?" New-style digital maps don't need to answer that question any more! Questions new-style maps need to answer include:
* I know the name of a place or street; where should I zoom in to see more things around that place or street?
* I need to go to a (gas station / rest stop / hospital); where's the closest one?
* How would I get home from where I am?
* I'm in an unfamiliar place and would like to go "downtown" (where there are restaurants and things to do); where is "downtown"?
* Where is my car right now?
Roads help you to orient yourself with the map, but they aren't as fundamentally important to digital maps as they were to old-style road maps. The visual space of the map might be better spent helping answer questions like these.
This kind of crowded display is fairly common now. I use Here Maps now which is much better + I like supporting a second option to avoid one service getting 2 monopolistic.
My theory of why google maps is getting worse is there must be designers dedicated to this that need to constantly look for 'new' things to add even if its to the detriment as they can hardly say its all good now and twiddle their thumbs. Maybe that's unfair but I've seen this effect on other digital products first hand.
One thing I still use Google maps and the GPS one on Android is to learn an area. For that, it is incredibly useful to map the real-world and digital context of where you are in relation to your surroundings, not just have it laser-honed on your route.
I've noticed when purely following GPS directions that I can't remember how to get there, even after a few times following it. Knowing the area helps you take your own informed alternate routes, know what things are on the way that you might want to detour (oh, I needed to go to the post office anyway), recognize if the GPS is going to the wrong destination because of user error, etc.
To expand on your second point, I believe Google Maps is optimized for the user to be following directions. Labels are irrelevant when you've got a blue line to follow.
In their perfect world you don't orient yourself with the map. You tell the map what you want and it tells you how to get there.
Google Maps, like several other google products (like Groups, even Search), has seen a constant degrade in user experience since 2005 or so.
Maybe people forgot, but google maps was /blazing fast/ in the beginning.
Nowdays, it brings my browser down to a crawl even before the images are shown. Maybe people are just stuck with this "google is the best" mentality, but this has stopped being universally true since many years.
Use OpenStreetMap. It's data is way superior. It's _your_ data. Cannot strett this enough.
Want a fancy browser? Nokia maps have always been incredibly sleek to use:
https://maps.here.com/
Heck, even bing maps are /so much faster/. The imagery is also higher quality in several regions.
Google has still the lead with street view, but for the actual maps I really encourage you to look for alternatives. They've destroyed their interface as far I'm concerned.
OpenSteetMap is very difficult to compare to Google Maps as it uses pre-rendered raster map images at fixed resolutions, rather than a dynamic vector-based approach. For me at least, this makes it far slower to load in non-cached areas, and the lack of precise zooming is super annoying.
Google News on mobile has become an awful experience on mobile. They hijacked the scrolling so it doesn't keep momentum like every other scrolling page in the system, and if you accidentally scroll downward with too much of an angle it swipes to a new section. I'm amazed every day it still exists and has not been fixed!!
So I am not crazy after all! The other day I was driving in Palm Springs, and I was using Google Maps. I literally had to zoom in until the road I was on almost completely field the screen before it would show me the name of the road or the roads around it. They did something to their display algorithm where you now have to zoom almost entirely into an area to see anything about the area, very inconvenient.
It drives me crazy that I can't find half of the labels I'm looking for, and when I do, I can't increase the size of the labels enough to make them readable. Frequently I'll have to fight with the map, zoom in and out and scroll around to get it to show me the name of a street at all, but when I finally do coax it into revealing a tiny name far downroad, the font is often too small to read. If I reflexively expand the map to get a closer look, everything expands except the label I'm trying to read.
And there's no way to expand it. I do understand that they don't want it to keep expanding beyond a certain point, especially as they add more details as they zoom. But they could let it expand within some constraints, such as the name of a street within the stripe of the street, and cap the size at 3x the normal size or some such thing.
If the algorithm for letting the labels grow a bit is just too hard for them, then just give me a little slider on the side to add a fixed, default label magnification factor. I could expand it a bit to make the labels easier to read in general, expand it more (but just temporarily) to get a better look at something, or shrink it a bit in cases where the labels were harder to read due to overcrowding.
As it is, they've removed too many useful labels without expanding the ones remaining to make them easier to read and prevented me from expanding them manually. Bother.
He, came here to post the same thing. Since the last 2 or 3 years I had the impression GM went worse (for what I do with it, not even mobile) after every update made to it, and sometimes also slower and more CPU hungry. To the point I stopped using it and went looking for alternatives.
Am I the only one who likes to know the road before my turn? That way I know when I need to change lanes/pay closer attention/whatever. New mapping apps really don't seem to want to share that information with me.
Yep, I find this extra annoying when I'm on the roads and have a bad internet connection, or no connection at all (common when I'm traveling in the less-populated regions of the US). I have to zoom in several levels to see the road, but often I can't due to the connection. This is really frustrating.
I'm surprised the author didn't mention the main difference between paper maps and google maps. That is, google maps is interactive. With a paper map what you see is what you get. You had to cram as much information as it would allow. But this is not the case with google maps. You can zoom in, out, and anywhere in between. You can't compare the two based on the level of information displayed at one fixed zoom level because google maps is 3D whereas traditional paper maps are 2D.
A funny thing about interactive maps while driving. If I'm on my phone and I bring up a road map of the area I'm traveling and I am constantly zooming in and panning the app so that I can see locations around me then the map has failed me.
Landmarks are key to any map, but landmarks that fade in and out of focus are not all that useful. I used to be excited by the prospect of being able to bring up a map of my route and being able to see where I was going on my phone mounted to my dash. But as of late, I've been struggling to find the right zoom level that shows enough detail of the area I'm traveling while showing enough of my route.
On a number of occasions over the last year I've has to pull over and reorient myself on my map due to a failed pan/zoom attempt.
It's funny that this article came out at this time as I've been evaluating ways to mount a larger device (tablet) on my dash as maps on my phone has gotten to be rather cumbersome.
I feel that for the most part the details in this article are accurate, that the attempt by google to make the maps load quicker on mobile have compromised critical details available on the maps.
One of the key areas where this could be addressed is by loading details based on need. For example if I select a travel route between two locations, load more of the details related to that route and reduce the extras that fall outside my concern. Show me roadways that leave my target route, as well as the cities and towns along my route. Making an attempt to provide me the details I need without my need to interact with them as much as possible would be great.
Maps, especially when used for real time navigation, are the poster boy example of what Bret Victor means when he says "Interactivity Considered Harmful". [1]
Interactivity is a failure state of software that could have predicted what the user wants from context and past behavior, and tailored the display and presented it to them without being asked.
"Further, the user might prefer to learn information while using her hands for other purposes, such as writing or eating or stroking a cat [or driving the car]. Each time software demands the user’s hands, this activity must be interrupted [at the risk of causing an accident]. Finally, the growing prevalence of computer-related repetitive stress injuries [and using smartphones while driving] suggests that indiscriminate interactivity may be considerably harmful in a literal, physical sense."
That is not true. A good paper (road) map has three zoom levels. 1) A major map covering most of one side of the paper, with enough information to get you easily across the focus area of the map. 2) Often on the side a smaller, sparser macro area map, showing only the freeways and the major cities/towns, often spanning a slight larger area than the main map. 3) A few downtown/focus maps, that are far more detailed than the main map, showing more rodes (sometimes walking paths, and bike lanes, house outlines, etc.). Often on the side along with the macro level map, or on the back next to the index. And 4) a really good paper map has also a macro level public transportation map (often on the back as well) at a zoom level between (1) and (2).
Yes, the interactivity (search, zoom, pan, satellite, topo, traffic, earth, streetview) of google maps acts very much like other dimensions to the map and makes it QUALITATIVELY different from paper maps.
The complaints of the OP are perfectly valid but they're more a matter of taste than an example of bad design decisions.
Maybe the OP would be satisfied with a couple of sliders?
Less Streets-------------|--More Streets
Less Cities-------------|--More Cities
>But this is not the case with google maps. You can zoom in, out, and anywhere in between.
The problem I have Google maps lately, is that i have to zoom so far in to see the names of some roads. To the point where nothing but the road is on screen before the name appears. It's a major UX issue.
Not only zooming, Google Maps also has search. If you're looking for Oakland, CA, you go to the search bar and type "Oakland, CA", and it shows up on the map. No need to scan the map for the thing you're looking for, that's the computer's job!
You can't zoom out if the information is only showed on a tight zoom. You need to keep zooming in and out.
Here's an example of how tight the zoom has to be to get eg bus stops to show up. For this example the user has to zoom in really close to get the bus stop shown, then either very careful start zooming out while keeping an eye on where their bus stop was OR keep panning.
Good luck trying to zoom in/out interactive map while driving motorcycle at 150 km/h.. I stopped using Google Maps for navigation years ago. I'd like to hear Google's explanation for their maps design decisions, because in my eyes (and all people I've talked to about this topic) they look spectacularly bad. I literary haven't encountered a single person that would say: "Google maps are cool" or "Google maps are getting better and better". Most of the times discussion about maps/navigation ends in sharing experience about alternatives. Lately I use Navigator on Android; it's simple, but gets the job done and as a bonus, supports offline navigation.
That's true, but they seen to cram in roads, at least visually. I would understand it if they optimized the display for navigation, where voice is the primary interface, and the display only is for support. For example, if the voice says "take exit X to Y" Y must be on the map, regardless of its size. And I would think (?of course?), it should not just jump onto the map and disappear a few seconds later.
So, if you plan a route, do the maps change depending on your destination?
There's a broad trend of tech companies disrupting traditional industries and then making rookie mistakes and generally not living up to the standards of the tradition.
Google, hire cartographers. Amazon, hire librarians and typesetters. Spotify, hire musicologists.
Isn’t it more a problem of having algorithms do what used to be done by humans?
I.e. when you look at a Google map it is using the latest GIS data to construct a “good” representation for your screen resolution using your specified zoom factor and possibly even with dynamic overlays or highlights.
Likewise, when you read an e-book you can read it on many different display sizes, pick your own font, and font size. So where we used to have the book typeset once by a person, it is now done on-the-fly using user and device specific parameters.
The result won’t be as good as when you have a human do it, and even when a human does it, there might be limitations in the e-book markup language, just like with HTML.
Strongly disagree with that. For one thing, Spotify already has an army of tastemakers spending all day assembling curated playlists. For another, they have the Echonest data which relies heavily on manual labeling.
But the major innovation in Discover Weekly was to use machine learning directly on mel spectrograms to figure out meaningful features for human taste. They still want to rely on their experts as much as possible (and hey, I don't blame them for not wanting to fire people), so they try to combine their expert's features with the algorithm's. But this introduces human biases again.
The problem is that when it comes to music, everyone's a missionary. Everyone wants the world to listen to the music
they are excited about. Professional opinion-haver about music is the dream job for many adults, much like chocolate factory taste QA expert is for 6-year olds. And they just can't separate their own opinions from objective truths very well. It's hard to be objective about something you love.
The real great thing about AI in recommendations isn't really the intelligence part. It's the "AO" - artificial objectivity. The algorithm is probably inferior to humans in some aspects (it can't interpret the themes in lyrics very well, for instance), but the advantage is that you have full confidence about
1. What information it actually might use, and
2. What it tries to optimize.
From point one, you can be sure that it's opinion on Smashing Pumpkins isn't affected by that annoying kid in 8th grade that used to listen to them. For point two, you can be sure it's really trying to find the music you will love, not what it thinks you should love.
To get it slightly back on track: I can't wait until an AI can do music history, or etymology, or economics, or history. Or matchmaking in dating! It will be useful long before it can match humans on intelligence. How great wouldn't it be to get results in those fields which you could trust were from a disinterested party.
The way I use Google Maps a lot is for discovery. I look at the map of New York to see cities around it. When I look at a more zoomed in level of the city I want to see different boroughs and major roads. More zoomed in you want to discover shops and businesses. The bareness of the current Google Maps makes it very unsuitable for these functions. For example, even at full zoom level it only shows a few (<5%) of the shops and bars at the city center where i live. If i want to get a feel for a city (where are the most restaurants, where are the shopping centres, etc) the maps are really bad for that unless i go searching for the specific terms in the search bar. But that is the down side of the search bar: you never finf something you didn't know you were looking for.
There's much more wrong with Google maps on the desktop than what the article mentions.
My biggest gripe is contrast, rather the lack thereof. Zooming in and out doesn't help. There's a lack of contrast at all levels!
And the algorithm for displaying place names sucks. You'll see certain names at one level, zoom in and they disappear, zoom in some more and they finally reappear.
Paper maps are unquestionably more ergonomic (but much less convenient) than Google maps. But it's not just Google. I find other online maps equally bad. It's quite sad that a paper Rand McNally map is so much better at actually presenting the geography of an area.
Perhaps other posters here are right, it seems like Google maps is designed for point-to-point navigation, nothing more.
The font is so small I had to zoom in 3 times to 150% get a comfortable size. And then zoomed in one more time to 175% to make the font a little thicker - as you say, due to the light color. The irony made me giggle a little.
I wouldn't mind too much if the website styling didn't break zooming in the browser. The paragraph width is fixed as a percentage of the viewport, which means zooming in only makes the font bigger, keeping the same narrow column for its contents.
On the whole the HTML and CSS on that blog are a mess though.
Firefox's Reader View helps here by bypassing the author's styling completely.
Fully agree. That's why I generally browse internet on mobile in Opera which supports text reflow and force-zoom, contrary to Chrome which only supports the latter.
Google know more than the author about how Google Maps is used by end users. The author is grading Google Maps based on the number of cities and roads displayed, not how the users use it.
Google provide an alternative mapping product, Google Earth, for satisfying curiosity about the planet. Google maps is primarily a navigation tool. They have very distinct use cases.
I'm sure Google knows more than the author about their own maps, but please give the author his due: he wrote a successful blog called 41Latitude that did a lot of in-depth analysis of Google Maps's display of information, and later led the Apple Maps team. If he has something to say about information density on maps, I'm inclined to listen.
I think the author's point is that as a navigational tool a more balanced map would be superior. I agree. Even on a mobile device I often find myself frustrated at how far in I have to zoom on a Google map to find details that could be included at higher levels. And as he illustrates, the map could be more balanced without being cluttered.
Google Map's directions doesn't work between postal codes in the UK, unless you specify the space. And it hasn't worked for about a year. I must say, I find Google Maps quite difficult to use.
I think it's safe to say that the Google Maps team hasn't cared about end-user convenience and utility for quite some time. The Google Maps of 2016 is utterly terrible compared to the same service ten years ago.
The new maps look clearer and less cluttered and more useful to me. I would guess that the maps were simply designed to follow their primary utility function which is navigation.
Old style printed maps had cities on them, because the map didn't know where you were going! You had to find your city or your location on the map. Now the map knows where you're going, so it can show that place extra-clearly while hiding a lot of detail that's not relevant. Roads are relatively more relevant than cities, since you travel along them to get from one place to another: displaying a road shows the user that they have a primary thoroughfare between locations. You might not care about the name of a city if you're just passing through; and the city that is your destination will be specifically shown.
My guess is that they display only as many cities as needed to help people orient themselves while looking at the map, to understand what they're seeing. More than that is irrelevant to the primary use-case of navigation.
> Google Maps of 2016 has a surplus of roads — but not enough cities. It's also out of balance. So what is the ideal? Balance.
The ideal is utility, and the key use-case for Google Maps at that zoom level is driving navigation. The user's going to input their own destination into maps anyway, most of the time, and they'll expect it to appear, so it's no surprise when it does.
Google would have data on this: how many users use Google Maps while driving regularly, multiple times on a trip (at that zoom level), while not having a destination entered (and with no destination, obviously no turn-by-turn directions)? Probably not many. Now imagine overlaying your route with current position and destination on the maps - it's going to be easier to scan the new ones. Edit: Navigation is the primary use-case for a map, and I'd guess usage motivated by that purpose dwarfs the rest by an order of magnitude, and so it's a good default.
What you write is true for navigating when driving a car. For those who try to use Google Maps for other purposes, the changes are somewhat less useful.
It's not surprising that paper maps often do a better job than Google maps, especially when you consider that people have been optimizing the format for several hundred years. For instance, you can't beat a decent topo map for browsing terrain looking for new places to go. Having a large map with high information density is just the ticket.
The place where Google maps really excel is applications that combine a search result of some kind with geographic data. For ordinary navigation, especially if you want geographical context rather than just directions from point A to B, traditional maps still are much better in my opinion.
Agree. I have no doubt the decision was based on lots of data and that Google got it right. And for my part I agree. I would imagine 95% of the people zoomed in around NYC are looking specifically for NYC. Having other, smaller cities labeled on the map only makes it more confusing.
Google is a data company and the data available has changed over the last few years. Maps are both a way to present data and a way to collect data.
The new data that Google has comes from Android handsets and from users using Google maps and Waze on Android and non-Android handsets.
This data is all about users in motion. At the scale shown in this article, it's almost exclusively people driving. As a result, it makes a lot more sense to focus on the connections over the places they connect. This becomes clearer when you view the roads as more active entities by including congestion and other real-time data.
This may not be the best presentation for everyone, but it seems to be the presentation that fits best with Google's current mission and capabilities.
The difference between today's Google maps and the authors 1960 paper map is easy to understand when you stop to think about how those maps are used.
The paper map was used to navigate from place to place. That never happens with a google map. Sure, you navigate with them, but by telling Google where you want to go and letting them draw a line on your map. You don't need all that extra information if your phone is navigating you from place to place. You just need something clean that you can glance at to get a sense of where you are.
So that's what they've designed their maps to give you.
Keep in mind that the tiles shown by default on the OpenStreetMap website are just an example rendering. Anyone can take the OpenStreetMap data and use it to render a map with different cartographic choices.
There's even several other example renderings that can be easily accessed on the website, for example
The Google part happened in Maps. It was a mapping product, and now it's a geographical fronted to search. The v2 was all about services on a cute (and sluggish) rendering substrate. It's now usable these days, still way slower than OSM or bing. I miss the old presentation but alas ...
ps: I recently discovered the 'my timelime' feature. Surprising to say the least.
This criticism reminds me a bit of when people criticize Google search results for a query like "insurance" or "shoes" having too many ads. Searching for vague terms is useless, so they just display ads instead.
At the zoom level the screenshots are taken at, maps are essentially useless. The most important information they can convey is "there's lots of roads here" or "this region is densely populated". The maps aren't optimized for accuracy, they're displaying a summary. The long island example really struck me - the old map displayed the primary route only, the new map conveys the fact that there are multiple options. If you're stuck in traffic and you pull up the map, you can see there's another decent route and ask the app to provide you with directions on an alternate route. If you're using the old maps, you'd just see the single primary route highlightedand assume you should stick with the route you're on.
It's the speed/lag that really annoys me nowadays. If I pan across the map or zoom in, I know I'm waiting a good 5-6 seconds before the new tiles will be loaded. And that's on desktop, not mobile. It's so irritating I've just about abandoned google.
Google really won't care about any comments here, they are all about the data. So simply stop using Google maps. Tell your family to stop using Google maps. Tell all your friends to stop using Google maps. Blog about not using Google Maps.
Find alternatives, there are several mentioned in these comments for starters.
When/if Google start seeing a reduction in their map use, only then will they start paying attention.
Right, giving away too many labels at once would make it too easy for people to copy the map data. By requiring much higher zoom levels, people would have to do many more requests to grab everything.
Not applicable at the zoom scale used in the article, but on higher zoom levels this is certainly a factor.
There might be something in that, yes. Obviously I don't know the details of Google's internal tech, but certainly that's true of the OSM equivalents: Mapnik (produces raster tiles) is much better at label placement than Mapbox GL (renders vector tiles).
Do you mean they're focusing more effort on reducing the complexity of the maps, to save bandwidth, because vectors derive much larger bandwidth savings from reduced complexity than bitmaps would?
I've noticed the disappearing detail from Google Maps as well, and I find it really annoying - especially when perusing a rural area and having to zoom in to ridiculous levels to see town names.
Another thing I'd like to see is making the "avoid tolls" setting easier to get to. Northern Illinois is toll road central, and I-355 in particular is a huge ripoff when you pay cash. Since I don't need any of the tollways for commuting, I can't justify getting an I-Pass.
It doesn't even remember the setting, you have to hit the three dots for menu before you search, choose "Route Options", then tick "Avoid tolls", then hit OK. EVERY TIME.
And if you forget to go through this and start navigation, there's no way to change it, you have to hit back, then do the above. Why not have a way to change route options from the navigation screen??
With open-source tools and services for OSM data from Mapzen and Mapbox, you can make your own map styles: light or heavy in detail, highlighting cities, highways or footpaths.
I suspect part of the idea is that you will use the search to find cities instead of finding them visually based on their names on the map. The issue with large cities that are near other large cities being omitted from maps is 'The Baltimore Phenomenon'
I've been noticing this but could never quite put my finger on what it was. This is exactly it.
On google maps I can never find what I want. I thought it was because I've been using OpenStreetMap, and had gotten used to a different display style. Seeing a place once in OSM anywhere in the world, and zooming out from it to continent view, I can almost always find it again later. On Google Maps I always got lost. Now I finally get what the problem is.
I noticed the same thing a few months ago. I live in a larger city, largest in our county, but we don't exist on the map unless you really zoom. A small town right next-door that's a lot more affluent shows up even when zoomed out to the tristate region. My guess was Google is stepping up their advertisement business for cities.
That or people just find whitespace aesthetically pleasing and Google designers went kind of crazy with it.
I've only ever been using Google Maps for the sattelite imagery, street view, and routin. For those things, Google Maps is still great. OpenStreetMap is what I use for orienting, find cycling paths, trails etc.
So I'm not too bothered by this change. What I don't understand is why hasn't anybody taken the Google Maps routing and use it in OSM apps? Might not be legal, but similar non-commercial projects it should be fine.
There's a lot of effort right now going into making OSM itself better for car navigation. (Take a look at the OSRM changelog: pretty much every feature in the last 6 months seems to be targeted to this use case.) And I'd say OSM is already better than Google for cycling and walking routing.
While the analysis is fine, the conclusion is almost certainly false. At Google's scale, nearly any iteration made on core products is backed by an immense understanding of their end users and a near unlimited supply of user data.
There can be a million things wrong with user testing, and while I am certain they know more about it than me, I think it's a safe bet to say they're not perfect either and may make mistakes in such a complex topic.
(Small example of what I mean: many people like the new style because it's prettier, but when I use OSM I get to places a lot faster than people using Google Maps, so they might be asking the wrong question even if they did user testing with a million people. But that's just one example of everything that could go wrong.)
> At Google's scale, nearly any iteration made on core products is backed by an immense understanding of their end users and a near unlimited supply of user data.
The "Google, where did I leave my keys?" joke is getting closer to feature status, and that's probably what's going on with Google Maps.
Anecdatum: last month I was driving out for a weekend in some rural bungalows a few miles outside a small city (Elvas, Portugal). The address was a bit vague, the place name too common, so much so that I had GPS coords stowed away in a message pic (don't ask ;-).
So, when I pop out Google Maps in the old faithful iPad2 (which happens to be the 3G version, and therefore GPS chipped, good for navigation), and zoom in the area ... amidst thin local roads and lots of blank space, there's the place name and the days we're staying there.
Turns out the Gmail app in that iPad was also used to send or review the emails with the reservations.
Even in my 'desktop' I've been noticing Google Maps marking out city places which seem small compared to other landmarks, but where I often go or mention in emails.
(Thanks, I do know where I left my keys today, I'm good.)
"The primary route across Long Island — Interstate 495"
Off-topic, but as a native NYCer, we would never call it that. It's the LIE. I once had a woman ask me in the parking lot of a Walgreens how to get on the 278. I was puzzled for a second, then I realized she was talking about the BQE. Living out in California now, I miss the days of calling highways by name.
I think what Google is doing makes sense given smartphone adoption and the fact the maps are use for fundamentally different functions now.
You don't need a hulking great map with loads of detail at a high level to get from point A to point B, you now just use your smartphone for that.
I assume Google spotted a trend of people searching place names as opposed to picking points between two separate locations.
So how does that change the function of the map?
Well, we no longer need to have the zoomed out overload of detail, if we need more information about a place we are visiting, we type in the city name, or address, then zoom in close to see the detail we need.
The article kind of skimps over the point that we can interact with those maps now.
"Less is just less. And that's certainly the case here."
Not sure I agree, in my opinion most of us use search & destinations nowadays, even in offline mode. The only reason I look at a map is to gauge distance between me and my destination.
Almost no one I know uses directions – all look at the map, see "3 intersections north, then right, then the 2nd on the left" and drive/bike/walk like that.
I certainly do
And for this use case Google maps is getting pretty useless
I've had the frustrating experience of looking on google maps and seeing a town I was looking for not be labeled at a zoom level where I could see where it was in relationship to other towns. But I wonder if part of this is about google trying to funnel users into using maps in a particular way. Is this their attempt to get users to search more and scrutinize maps less?
Are they trying to make online interactive maps a different experience than paper maps?
It's way too slow and its missing some stuff buts it's moving in the right direction. Task based (someone mentioned this) is correct. Tasks are easy targets for Google's user-centered design and machine learning. It's not as simple as reproducing a road map from the 1950's, adding pan and zoom and calling it a day. You design for the device (hint: mobile) and the tasks that are used MOST. Do you really think Google doesn't keep track? People don't use Google Maps the same way as a 20in folded road map or a school atlas. If you wonder what tasks are they are designing for just look at the UI of the App. It's dominated by a big SEARCH bar and a big "get DIRECTIONS" button. That's what people do and that's what it's designed for. They are trying to make it glanceable in a car and make room to see search results or to add stuff based on interaction (like traffic, alternative routes, etc.) and not waste time and bandwidth on loading all the extra crap.
The difference between the album-cover paper map and Google Maps is that every "pixel" on the paper map was put there by conscious, functional and esthetic choice. In fact the people who designed and drew that map probably bragged about it to their peers.
No designing human ever sees a rendered Google Map, except for testing. The overall esthetic programmed into the algorithms are designed, but no human looks at the final result and says "it would just look better if this was shifted up and to the right a bit." There are an infinite number of possible renderings on a digital map, but a specific published paper map goes out the door with a sigh of satisfaction.
Which is to say, there's a long way to go before a digitial map is beautiful, and a specific rendering is as good as possible for the person viewing it for a specific purpose.
The only way digital maps win (and they do) is that you can ask them things, and they cover the world.
From my experience, using the Google maps within the city, it tends to ne pretty sparse with labels by default.
This is a good thing because in a place like tokyo there is just too much stuff - if I care for aometgubd I either search for it, or drop a pub and check what is around.
On the other hand, Maps always shows the labels of things I have searched for in the past, yielding a customized legend of landmarks+things that matter to me.
The conclusion seems to undermine the whole piece. If the changes were made to help mobile uses then great, I almost always use it on mobile, and apparently so do the majority of users.
He poses the question of which map you'd want when lost. A mobile phone with Google Maps is clearly the right answer.
The comparison to a paper map is stupid. A paper map is severely limited in that you can't zoom in on it so it has to be packed with enough information to hopefully be useful. An interactive map only needs to give you enough context to know what to zoom in on. If I'm using a touch interface that overloads me with information in one screen, it's a bad interface.
It's like claiming that the new york times should display the entire full front page of the newspaper on a mobile device so you can read several articles without scrolling or loading more content because that's what you used to be able to do with the real paper.
Not stupid at all, actually. The paper map is hand-tuned and shows a great deal of thought and care about precisely what to show, how to show it, and where to show it.
There are many lessons that digital maps can learn from hand-crafted maps.
The article has its points and it is always interesting to analyze those specific readibility and rendering analysis. It helps to understand the choice made by interactive map platforms through static image and dynamic controls.
Justin O'Beirne knows what he is talking about. He has worked for Apple Maps and he also created other interesting and really precise analysis in the past.
It's probably already been said, but comparing Google Maps to a paper map is stupid.
The paper map has to have lots of cities on it, because there's no other way to find where exactly the specific suburb is if it's not on the map. In Google Maps, you can zoom in, you can search, you can have a link for direction sent to you, ...
The author may claim "less is just less", but apart from "printing a map before knowing where I'm going", I can't think of a situation where the "improved" map would be at all useful.
Great article, but man it reads oddly with JavaScript turned off. Huge masses of text repeated, scrolling weirdly broken. It's almost a proof of its own point …
Optimal placement of labels is an NP-hard problem[1]. Since google maps transferred to vector and label placement is now done on the (mobile) client, I am not surprised by what happened.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_label_placement
When using a map for navigation at a glance, with a route overlaid on the map, I do not need to know the names of the streets, but I do need to see that there are three cross streets before my turn.
Comparing google maps to here maps at the same zoom level (on desktop, not on mobile) here maps has more info. It's like google maps has completely given up on the desktop.
panic|9 years ago
That said, I also think the focus on paper maps is misplaced. Old-style road maps had to answer the question, "how do I get there from here?" New-style digital maps don't need to answer that question any more! Questions new-style maps need to answer include:
* I know the name of a place or street; where should I zoom in to see more things around that place or street?
* I need to go to a (gas station / rest stop / hospital); where's the closest one?
* How would I get home from where I am?
* I'm in an unfamiliar place and would like to go "downtown" (where there are restaurants and things to do); where is "downtown"?
* Where is my car right now?
Roads help you to orient yourself with the map, but they aren't as fundamentally important to digital maps as they were to old-style road maps. The visual space of the map might be better spent helping answer questions like these.
Gustomaximus|9 years ago
This kind of crowded display is fairly common now. I use Here Maps now which is much better + I like supporting a second option to avoid one service getting 2 monopolistic.
My theory of why google maps is getting worse is there must be designers dedicated to this that need to constantly look for 'new' things to add even if its to the detriment as they can hardly say its all good now and twiddle their thumbs. Maybe that's unfair but I've seen this effect on other digital products first hand.
white-flame|9 years ago
I've noticed when purely following GPS directions that I can't remember how to get there, even after a few times following it. Knowing the area helps you take your own informed alternate routes, know what things are on the way that you might want to detour (oh, I needed to go to the post office anyway), recognize if the GPS is going to the wrong destination because of user error, etc.
taneq|9 years ago
In their perfect world you don't orient yourself with the map. You tell the map what you want and it tells you how to get there.
googleisking|9 years ago
Maybe people forgot, but google maps was /blazing fast/ in the beginning.
Nowdays, it brings my browser down to a crawl even before the images are shown. Maybe people are just stuck with this "google is the best" mentality, but this has stopped being universally true since many years.
Use OpenStreetMap. It's data is way superior. It's _your_ data. Cannot strett this enough.
Want a fancy browser? Nokia maps have always been incredibly sleek to use:
Heck, even bing maps are /so much faster/. The imagery is also higher quality in several regions.Google has still the lead with street view, but for the actual maps I really encourage you to look for alternatives. They've destroyed their interface as far I'm concerned.
nud|9 years ago
adzm|9 years ago
x0054|9 years ago
SiVal|9 years ago
And there's no way to expand it. I do understand that they don't want it to keep expanding beyond a certain point, especially as they add more details as they zoom. But they could let it expand within some constraints, such as the name of a street within the stripe of the street, and cap the size at 3x the normal size or some such thing.
If the algorithm for letting the labels grow a bit is just too hard for them, then just give me a little slider on the side to add a fixed, default label magnification factor. I could expand it a bit to make the labels easier to read in general, expand it more (but just temporarily) to get a better look at something, or shrink it a bit in cases where the labels were harder to read due to overcrowding.
As it is, they've removed too many useful labels without expanding the ones remaining to make them easier to read and prevented me from expanding them manually. Bother.
stinos|9 years ago
He, came here to post the same thing. Since the last 2 or 3 years I had the impression GM went worse (for what I do with it, not even mobile) after every update made to it, and sometimes also slower and more CPU hungry. To the point I stopped using it and went looking for alternatives.
wtbob|9 years ago
Numberwang|9 years ago
Especially driving country roads and having to zoom in to kite level in order to see the medium sized villages is ridiculous.
Anyone know if Bing Maps is better?
idop|9 years ago
elmerland|9 years ago
orillian|9 years ago
Landmarks are key to any map, but landmarks that fade in and out of focus are not all that useful. I used to be excited by the prospect of being able to bring up a map of my route and being able to see where I was going on my phone mounted to my dash. But as of late, I've been struggling to find the right zoom level that shows enough detail of the area I'm traveling while showing enough of my route.
On a number of occasions over the last year I've has to pull over and reorient myself on my map due to a failed pan/zoom attempt.
It's funny that this article came out at this time as I've been evaluating ways to mount a larger device (tablet) on my dash as maps on my phone has gotten to be rather cumbersome.
I feel that for the most part the details in this article are accurate, that the attempt by google to make the maps load quicker on mobile have compromised critical details available on the maps.
One of the key areas where this could be addressed is by loading details based on need. For example if I select a travel route between two locations, load more of the details related to that route and reduce the extras that fall outside my concern. Show me roadways that leave my target route, as well as the cities and towns along my route. Making an attempt to provide me the details I need without my need to interact with them as much as possible would be great.
DonHopkins|9 years ago
Interactivity is a failure state of software that could have predicted what the user wants from context and past behavior, and tailored the display and presented it to them without being asked.
"Further, the user might prefer to learn information while using her hands for other purposes, such as writing or eating or stroking a cat [or driving the car]. Each time software demands the user’s hands, this activity must be interrupted [at the risk of causing an accident]. Finally, the growing prevalence of computer-related repetitive stress injuries [and using smartphones while driving] suggests that indiscriminate interactivity may be considerably harmful in a literal, physical sense."
[1] http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/
runarberg|9 years ago
That is not true. A good paper (road) map has three zoom levels. 1) A major map covering most of one side of the paper, with enough information to get you easily across the focus area of the map. 2) Often on the side a smaller, sparser macro area map, showing only the freeways and the major cities/towns, often spanning a slight larger area than the main map. 3) A few downtown/focus maps, that are far more detailed than the main map, showing more rodes (sometimes walking paths, and bike lanes, house outlines, etc.). Often on the side along with the macro level map, or on the back next to the index. And 4) a really good paper map has also a macro level public transportation map (often on the back as well) at a zoom level between (1) and (2).
crispyambulance|9 years ago
The complaints of the OP are perfectly valid but they're more a matter of taste than an example of bad design decisions.
Maybe the OP would be satisfied with a couple of sliders?
ozmbie|9 years ago
The problem I have Google maps lately, is that i have to zoom so far in to see the names of some roads. To the point where nothing but the road is on screen before the name appears. It's a major UX issue.
rcthompson|9 years ago
DanBC|9 years ago
You can't zoom out if the information is only showed on a tight zoom. You need to keep zooming in and out.
Here's an example of how tight the zoom has to be to get eg bus stops to show up. For this example the user has to zoom in really close to get the bus stop shown, then either very careful start zooming out while keeping an eye on where their bus stop was OR keep panning.
http://imgur.com/a/tFRlS
kbart|9 years ago
Someone|9 years ago
So, if you plan a route, do the maps change depending on your destination?
mbrock|9 years ago
Google, hire cartographers. Amazon, hire librarians and typesetters. Spotify, hire musicologists.
sorbits|9 years ago
I.e. when you look at a Google map it is using the latest GIS data to construct a “good” representation for your screen resolution using your specified zoom factor and possibly even with dynamic overlays or highlights.
Likewise, when you read an e-book you can read it on many different display sizes, pick your own font, and font size. So where we used to have the book typeset once by a person, it is now done on-the-fly using user and device specific parameters.
The result won’t be as good as when you have a human do it, and even when a human does it, there might be limitations in the e-book markup language, just like with HTML.
vintermann|9 years ago
Strongly disagree with that. For one thing, Spotify already has an army of tastemakers spending all day assembling curated playlists. For another, they have the Echonest data which relies heavily on manual labeling.
But the major innovation in Discover Weekly was to use machine learning directly on mel spectrograms to figure out meaningful features for human taste. They still want to rely on their experts as much as possible (and hey, I don't blame them for not wanting to fire people), so they try to combine their expert's features with the algorithm's. But this introduces human biases again.
The problem is that when it comes to music, everyone's a missionary. Everyone wants the world to listen to the music they are excited about. Professional opinion-haver about music is the dream job for many adults, much like chocolate factory taste QA expert is for 6-year olds. And they just can't separate their own opinions from objective truths very well. It's hard to be objective about something you love.
The real great thing about AI in recommendations isn't really the intelligence part. It's the "AO" - artificial objectivity. The algorithm is probably inferior to humans in some aspects (it can't interpret the themes in lyrics very well, for instance), but the advantage is that you have full confidence about
1. What information it actually might use, and
2. What it tries to optimize.
From point one, you can be sure that it's opinion on Smashing Pumpkins isn't affected by that annoying kid in 8th grade that used to listen to them. For point two, you can be sure it's really trying to find the music you will love, not what it thinks you should love.
To get it slightly back on track: I can't wait until an AI can do music history, or etymology, or economics, or history. Or matchmaking in dating! It will be useful long before it can match humans on intelligence. How great wouldn't it be to get results in those fields which you could trust were from a disinterested party.
powera|9 years ago
rrockstar|9 years ago
PhantomGremlin|9 years ago
My biggest gripe is contrast, rather the lack thereof. Zooming in and out doesn't help. There's a lack of contrast at all levels!
And the algorithm for displaying place names sucks. You'll see certain names at one level, zoom in and they disappear, zoom in some more and they finally reappear.
Paper maps are unquestionably more ergonomic (but much less convenient) than Google maps. But it's not just Google. I find other online maps equally bad. It's quite sad that a paper Rand McNally map is so much better at actually presenting the geography of an area.
Perhaps other posters here are right, it seems like Google maps is designed for point-to-point navigation, nothing more.
rspeer|9 years ago
developer2|9 years ago
Freak_NL|9 years ago
On the whole the HTML and CSS on that blog are a mess though.
Firefox's Reader View helps here by bypassing the author's styling completely.
skarap|9 years ago
ljk|9 years ago
jakub_g|9 years ago
unknown|9 years ago
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altitudinous|9 years ago
Google provide an alternative mapping product, Google Earth, for satisfying curiosity about the planet. Google maps is primarily a navigation tool. They have very distinct use cases.
kylec|9 years ago
tempestn|9 years ago
spilk|9 years ago
beejiu|9 years ago
CamperBob2|9 years ago
You don't get customer feedback like this (https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/HfC6dYi4...) when you're doing things right.
Pyxl101|9 years ago
Old style printed maps had cities on them, because the map didn't know where you were going! You had to find your city or your location on the map. Now the map knows where you're going, so it can show that place extra-clearly while hiding a lot of detail that's not relevant. Roads are relatively more relevant than cities, since you travel along them to get from one place to another: displaying a road shows the user that they have a primary thoroughfare between locations. You might not care about the name of a city if you're just passing through; and the city that is your destination will be specifically shown.
My guess is that they display only as many cities as needed to help people orient themselves while looking at the map, to understand what they're seeing. More than that is irrelevant to the primary use-case of navigation.
> Google Maps of 2016 has a surplus of roads — but not enough cities. It's also out of balance. So what is the ideal? Balance.
The ideal is utility, and the key use-case for Google Maps at that zoom level is driving navigation. The user's going to input their own destination into maps anyway, most of the time, and they'll expect it to appear, so it's no surprise when it does.
Google would have data on this: how many users use Google Maps while driving regularly, multiple times on a trip (at that zoom level), while not having a destination entered (and with no destination, obviously no turn-by-turn directions)? Probably not many. Now imagine overlaying your route with current position and destination on the maps - it's going to be easier to scan the new ones. Edit: Navigation is the primary use-case for a map, and I'd guess usage motivated by that purpose dwarfs the rest by an order of magnitude, and so it's a good default.
teddyh|9 years ago
hodgesrm|9 years ago
The place where Google maps really excel is applications that combine a search result of some kind with geographic data. For ordinary navigation, especially if you want geographical context rather than just directions from point A to B, traditional maps still are much better in my opinion.
mgalka|9 years ago
tomfaulhaber|9 years ago
The new data that Google has comes from Android handsets and from users using Google maps and Waze on Android and non-Android handsets.
This data is all about users in motion. At the scale shown in this article, it's almost exclusively people driving. As a result, it makes a lot more sense to focus on the connections over the places they connect. This becomes clearer when you view the roads as more active entities by including congestion and other real-time data.
This may not be the best presentation for everyone, but it seems to be the presentation that fits best with Google's current mission and capabilities.
jasonkester|9 years ago
The paper map was used to navigate from place to place. That never happens with a google map. Sure, you navigate with them, but by telling Google where you want to go and letting them draw a line on your map. You don't need all that extra information if your phone is navigating you from place to place. You just need something clean that you can glance at to get a sense of where you are.
So that's what they've designed their maps to give you.
a3_nm|9 years ago
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5263/-73.8556
https://www.google.fr/maps/@40.5487361,-73.9399427,9z
(Edit: as the child comments correctly point out, this is only the default OSM rendering style.)
maxerickson|9 years ago
There's even several other example renderings that can be easily accessed on the website, for example
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5253/-74.2003&layers...
lucb1e|9 years ago
"ugh that is so ugly look at all this clutter"
ris|9 years ago
agumonkey|9 years ago
ps: I recently discovered the 'my timelime' feature. Surprising to say the least.
notatoad|9 years ago
At the zoom level the screenshots are taken at, maps are essentially useless. The most important information they can convey is "there's lots of roads here" or "this region is densely populated". The maps aren't optimized for accuracy, they're displaying a summary. The long island example really struck me - the old map displayed the primary route only, the new map conveys the fact that there are multiple options. If you're stuck in traffic and you pull up the map, you can see there's another decent route and ask the app to provide you with directions on an alternate route. If you're using the old maps, you'd just see the single primary route highlightedand assume you should stick with the route you're on.
DanHulton|9 years ago
cr3ative|9 years ago
Default rendering: http://i.imgur.com/uhbRcsR.png
gefh|9 years ago
adwf|9 years ago
ulkesh|9 years ago
SeanDav|9 years ago
Find alternatives, there are several mentioned in these comments for starters.
When/if Google start seeing a reduction in their map use, only then will they start paying attention.
iamflimflam1|9 years ago
lucb1e|9 years ago
Not applicable at the zoom scale used in the article, but on higher zoom levels this is certainly a factor.
Doctor_Fegg|9 years ago
FatalLogic|9 years ago
flyinghamster|9 years ago
Another thing I'd like to see is making the "avoid tolls" setting easier to get to. Northern Illinois is toll road central, and I-355 in particular is a huge ripoff when you pay cash. Since I don't need any of the tollways for commuting, I can't justify getting an I-Pass.
brokenmachine|9 years ago
It doesn't even remember the setting, you have to hit the three dots for menu before you search, choose "Route Options", then tick "Avoid tolls", then hit OK. EVERY TIME.
And if you forget to go through this and start navigation, there's no way to change it, you have to hit back, then do the above. Why not have a way to change route options from the navigation screen??
tuukkah|9 years ago
cwmma|9 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartographic_generalization#Th...
lucb1e|9 years ago
On google maps I can never find what I want. I thought it was because I've been using OpenStreetMap, and had gotten used to a different display style. Seeing a place once in OSM anywhere in the world, and zooming out from it to continent view, I can almost always find it again later. On Google Maps I always got lost. Now I finally get what the problem is.
jalami|9 years ago
That or people just find whitespace aesthetically pleasing and Google designers went kind of crazy with it.
ekr|9 years ago
So I'm not too bothered by this change. What I don't understand is why hasn't anybody taken the Google Maps routing and use it in OSM apps? Might not be legal, but similar non-commercial projects it should be fine.
Doctor_Fegg|9 years ago
jrbapna|9 years ago
lucb1e|9 years ago
(Small example of what I mean: many people like the new style because it's prettier, but when I use OSM I get to places a lot faster than people using Google Maps, so they might be asking the wrong question even if they did user testing with a million people. But that's just one example of everything that could go wrong.)
DanBC|9 years ago
Which just makes the changes to maps so baffling.
ableal|9 years ago
Anecdatum: last month I was driving out for a weekend in some rural bungalows a few miles outside a small city (Elvas, Portugal). The address was a bit vague, the place name too common, so much so that I had GPS coords stowed away in a message pic (don't ask ;-).
So, when I pop out Google Maps in the old faithful iPad2 (which happens to be the 3G version, and therefore GPS chipped, good for navigation), and zoom in the area ... amidst thin local roads and lots of blank space, there's the place name and the days we're staying there.
Turns out the Gmail app in that iPad was also used to send or review the emails with the reservations.
Even in my 'desktop' I've been noticing Google Maps marking out city places which seem small compared to other landmarks, but where I often go or mention in emails.
(Thanks, I do know where I left my keys today, I'm good.)
JetSpiegel|9 years ago
donretag|9 years ago
Off-topic, but as a native NYCer, we would never call it that. It's the LIE. I once had a woman ask me in the parking lot of a Walgreens how to get on the 278. I was puzzled for a second, then I realized she was talking about the BQE. Living out in California now, I miss the days of calling highways by name.
AJRF|9 years ago
You don't need a hulking great map with loads of detail at a high level to get from point A to point B, you now just use your smartphone for that.
I assume Google spotted a trend of people searching place names as opposed to picking points between two separate locations.
So how does that change the function of the map?
Well, we no longer need to have the zoomed out overload of detail, if we need more information about a place we are visiting, we type in the city name, or address, then zoom in close to see the detail we need.
The article kind of skimps over the point that we can interact with those maps now.
Tempest1981|9 years ago
lemiffe|9 years ago
Not sure I agree, in my opinion most of us use search & destinations nowadays, even in offline mode. The only reason I look at a map is to gauge distance between me and my destination.
kuschku|9 years ago
I certainly do
And for this use case Google maps is getting pretty useless
jccalhoun|9 years ago
scbd|9 years ago
unknown|9 years ago
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sz4kerto|9 years ago
sccxy|9 years ago
Offline usage is best for travelling.
Nux|9 years ago
darkhorn|9 years ago
kuschku|9 years ago
Google’s products are shit outside of the US, more at 11
It’s nothing new, it’s been like this for quite a while.
a3n|9 years ago
No designing human ever sees a rendered Google Map, except for testing. The overall esthetic programmed into the algorithms are designed, but no human looks at the final result and says "it would just look better if this was shifted up and to the right a bit." There are an infinite number of possible renderings on a digital map, but a specific published paper map goes out the door with a sigh of satisfaction.
Which is to say, there's a long way to go before a digitial map is beautiful, and a specific rendering is as good as possible for the person viewing it for a specific purpose.
The only way digital maps win (and they do) is that you can ask them things, and they cover the world.
ddimitrov|9 years ago
This is a good thing because in a place like tokyo there is just too much stuff - if I care for aometgubd I either search for it, or drop a pub and check what is around.
On the other hand, Maps always shows the labels of things I have searched for in the past, yielding a customized legend of landmarks+things that matter to me.
ZeroGravitas|9 years ago
He poses the question of which map you'd want when lost. A mobile phone with Google Maps is clearly the right answer.
hueving|9 years ago
It's like claiming that the new york times should display the entire full front page of the newspaper on a mobile device so you can read several articles without scrolling or loading more content because that's what you used to be able to do with the real paper.
Bud|9 years ago
There are many lessons that digital maps can learn from hand-crafted maps.
unknown|9 years ago
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nicoboo|9 years ago
Justin O'Beirne knows what he is talking about. He has worked for Apple Maps and he also created other interesting and really precise analysis in the past.
http://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/google-maps-and-label-rea...
powera|9 years ago
The paper map has to have lots of cities on it, because there's no other way to find where exactly the specific suburb is if it's not on the map. In Google Maps, you can zoom in, you can search, you can have a link for direction sent to you, ...
The author may claim "less is just less", but apart from "printing a map before knowing where I'm going", I can't think of a situation where the "improved" map would be at all useful.
wtbob|9 years ago
sztanko|9 years ago
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praestigiare|9 years ago
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macintux|9 years ago
http://imgur.com/5CvnHn8
sztanko|9 years ago
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