Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

Frozen in place would have been more useful. Even just talking about the new UI, Google Maps has become a giant pain to work with.

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

You can still switch back to Classic Maps via the question-mark icon in the bottom right. Classic for life.

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".

My pet peeve as a Londoner; the disappearance of the transit layer when searching for a place. If you've not searched for anything, New-oogle Maps will happily show you the card that lets you activate the transit layer and superimpose the spiderweb of tube lines on to the London map. However, the second a marker gets dropped, good luck seeing that layer ever again.

I mean, even if you clickity clack through the directions>origin>transit, Google will mark up its suggested routes while still refusing to superimpose the tube lines. It's maddening! For all the sophisticated route-mapping that I'm sure Google is bringing to bear on the problem, I'd much rather just look at a map that simultaneously shows a search result marker and the tube network at the same time and figure out my own route. And heaven forbid that I might want to see a collection of results for DIY shops and figure out which one I can get to quickest with reference to the underground network -- it seems that Google would have me route-map each of them in turn, write down the results and then decide. It's so deeply counter-intuitive that I struggle to think of any possible rationalisation for the decision.

I don't suppose anyone has a bookmarklet that toggles the transit layer?