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Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

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Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#131

Post by krsunny »

bluecalm wrote: post #125
joel_perl_prog wrote: post #6

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.…

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 f…

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.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#132

Post by Silhouette »

joel_perl_prog wrote: post #33
Pacabel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I hear ya. Whoever guided this Titanic into the iceberg...well he ain't no Steve Jobs. That's for sure. It's hard to overstate how just plain awful Google Maps is now. It's amazing, in a way. I literally cannot understand how so many smart people can, all together, fail to observe the obvious. Manifestly obviously just shit awful. To observe this one only needs a few seconds with Google Maps. A few minutes cemen…

I literally cannot understand how so many smart people can, all together, fail to observe the obvious.

That one's easy. It turns out that roles like management and marketing and customer support are actually important for developing good products, but the culture at "engineer"-led organisations doesn't always acknowledge or respect that.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#133

Post by wyck »

maxerickson wrote: post #105
wyck wrote: post #95

The old google maps allows you to paste KML file URL's into the search, now it doesn't work, you have to revert to the old version. ps. KML files were developed by Google for maps...

Keyhole created KML for use in their earth viewer. Later, Google bought them and branded the software as Google Earth. Supporting KML in the web maps was just a neat thing Google also did.

Ah did not know that, it was for sure a neat thing they did. I manage a site that uses KML files extensively for bike and running paths and this switch did cause a minor bump.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#134

Post by gdulli »

mhurron wrote: post #21
bambax wrote: post #20

What's happening with Google Maps is reminiscent of IE6: a beautiful product appears, light-years ahead of the competition, and free. The competition in question, being light-years behind, and non-free, promptly dies. Then the beautiful product gets frozen in place, and its team "locked up in a dark dungeon" (Spolsky, 2004), which creates a huge opportunity for (open) alternatives. OpenStreetMap + Leaflet is to Googl…

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.

Exactly. The problem is, Google has all these employees they need to keep busy, which translates into "upgrading" or redesigning products whether they need it or not. Products always suffer from this pattern.

It turns out that Google isn't smart enough to avoid the same mistakes made by the companies it supplanted.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#135

Post by eropple »

bluecalm wrote: post #125
joel_perl_prog wrote: post #6

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.…

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 f…

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.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#137

Post by sliverstorm »

joel_perl_prog wrote: post #6

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.…

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.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#138

Post by Silhouette »

sanderjd wrote: post #70
Pacabel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on who you are, and how you use the browser. Maybe the Chrome UI is good for somebody with a tiny screen and a near-complete lack of technical ability. But for people with large monitors and the need to push a web browser hard, they've merely managed to strip out or hide a lot of very useful functionality, with essentially no benefit. What's left over is non-standard and awkward to use (like Chrome's menu)…

I have a large monitor, but I have no idea what you mean by "push a web browser hard". Chrome's UI is great because it recognizes that what is important in a browser UI is the content area, not the, well ... chrome. I have no concept of what you could possibly be doing with the menu so often that it bugs you. A little more on topic: one person's "crappy hipster redesign" is another person's "wow this is so much bette…

Chrome's UI is great because it recognizes that what is important in a browser UI is the content area, not the, well ... chrome.

Sure it is, as long as you only want to look at one page above the fold.

But sometimes I want to navigate between pages, and at that point I do want my bookmarks bar displayed.

Sometimes I want to scroll a page, and at that point I do want scrollbars that work the way my system is setup instead of some almost invisible, almost unclickable little rectangle at the edge of the window.

Sometimes I want to use developer tools, and that that point I do want concepts like whitespace and fonts larger than 5px and coloured icons that are easily recognisable to exist, instead of prioritising cramming so much information into the available space that all of it becomes almost illegible.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#139

Post by glesica »

jsnell wrote: post #55

This is a bad article. It tries to draw some kind of causality link between the new maps UI and a couple of bad search results that the author received. (And then tries to blame it on some completely random academic paper written by Googlers, which as far as I can tell doesn't even have a hint of being from a geo-context, and doesn't look particularly applicable to geocoding or local searches). Of course blaming the…

I tried the new maps when they first released it. Clearly the search was different in some ways because simple directions searches simple wouldn't work. Since the, obviously, they have ironed out those bugs. But in the intervening years, every time I've tried the "new" maps I've run screaming back to the "old" maps because of the terrible UX. Are the search results "worse"? Maybe not. But the same results presented in a nearly-unusable manner probably "feels" like worse results.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#140

Post by bobbyi_settv »

noir_lord wrote: post #59

I was trying to find out how much it costs to use Google Maps in a business product (SaaS) I literally could not find a price without the "give us your details and our sales team will be in touch" which to me translates as "We need to work out exactly where to stick the hose to suck out the money". Compare that with this https://www.mapbox.com/plans/ . I know who will be getting my money in the near future.

Have you looked at OpenStreetMap? Is there anything in particular that it lacks compared to Mapbox?
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