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Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

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Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#181

Post by dragonwriter »

joel_perl_prog wrote: post #152
dragonwriter wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 littl…

> 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

It was clear you were complaining about double-click to zoom, but it was far less clear what about double-click to zoom your complaint was about. I guessed you might have been complaining that double-click to zoom was the only method, as Maps used (IIRC) to also support drag to zoom, but you have no clarified your complaint.

> This no longer works correctly.

IME, it always works correctly. Like most situations where you have both a double click and click functionality, variations in the speed of a double click sometimes result in accidentally getting the functionality of single clicking twice rather than the desired double click functionality, but that's nothing special to Google Maps.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#182

Post by dragonwriter »

Pacabel wrote: post #78
leemcalilly wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your argument, but there's no need to go in with the "hipsters" or "looking trendy" thing. I immediately get turned off when someone uses "hipster" pejoratively. You might as well have just used "millenials" or "kids these day." It ruins a perfectly cogent argument.

Like I said in an earlier comment, age has very little to do with this. "Hipsters" can pretty much be any age. It's more the "hipster" mindset and attitude that's the problem. This attitude involves fashion and trends trumping all other considerations. Maybe that's okay when it comes to something like clothing. It isn't acceptable, however, when it comes to tools that are supposed to be productive, including software…

> This attitude involves fashion and trends trumping all other considerations.

90% of the complaints I see about things being bad now because of "fashion and trends trumping all other considerations" seem to just be people applying who are themselves putting fashions and trends above all other considerations -- its just that they found a fashion or trend that they favored several years ago and are upset that the rest of the world doesn't still favor that fashion/trend.

And that's not entirely unreasonable -- or necessarily detached from personal productivity. Something that is a common trend in a field where productivity is relevant is almost certainly also useful to some subset of the market. Likewise, compatibility with expectations driven by trends external to the field can make new fashions also more productive to the mass market, even if they aren't more productive to the subset that the prior fashion "clicked" with well on a deeper level.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#183

Post by anon1385 »

jsnell wrote: post #128
anon1385 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>At that time amazing amounts of CPU and engineer time would be spent on verifying the quality of all algorithm and data changes, both during development and during launch. Changes that were unevaluated or were a net negative on quality would only be launched under very exceptional circumstances. Maybe they should actually try using the product instead of relying on automated algorithms to generate metrics when they…

It's a good thing that I didn't say anything about "automated algorithms used to generate metrics", then... This was machine-aided human evaluation. Search quality evaluation can't really be done without humans in the loop. If you had an algorithm that could distinguish between a good result and a bad result, you wouldn't use it to evaluate results. You'd use it to generate the results.

>Search quality evaluation can't really be done without humans in the loop.

I wasn't talking about search though. I was talking about the map rendering.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#184

Post by euank »

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…

My issue with Chrome's UI is that it is inflexible. I agree that the content area is important; as such, my firefox displays much more content (while also displaying more useful icons IMO).

In Chrome, you take what Google gives you and you better like it. I'll admit, it's not a bad default.

Firefox, however, allows addons to fundamentally alter the appearance of the webbrowser. I can add stylish themes that do all sorts of awesome things. I can use vimperator with "set gui=nonavigation" and reclaim even more space for content.

This fundamental difference is the reason I think Chrome's UI is bad. Firefox, you can customize the gui to be good for any definition of good. Chrome's only works if your definition of good aligns with Google's.

Also, for an example of when Chrome's UI fails, simply try and half-screen it on a 1080p screen with 30+ tabs open. All the tab favicons vanish. There's no way to search for an existing open tab (akin to firefox's % Location Bar Search character[0]).

If you'd like, I could show you my firefox and chrome running side by side with firefox having dozen's of more pixels of content-viewing area. Even if you don't like my setup, the fact that I can change it at all makes it an obvious win for me.

[0]: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_search#Location_Bar_s...

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#185

Post by maxerickson »

nailer wrote: post #142

Google knows: - Home is in London - Work is in London - My most recent restaurant reviews are in London - My IP address is in London - My location, if you ask my browser, is in London Stop showing me a map of the US when I open Maps.

I'm in the U.S.

If I open https://maps.google.co.uk/ it shows the UK.

I expect there are people in places outside the U.S. who would be frustrated by maps.google.com showing their current location, so it isn't an easy thing to solve for everyone.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#186

Post by dwb »

nailer wrote: post #142

Google knows: - Home is in London - Work is in London - My most recent restaurant reviews are in London - My IP address is in London - My location, if you ask my browser, is in London Stop showing me a map of the US when I open Maps.

I agree, and this is just a workaround, but use http://maps.google.co.uk instead.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#187

Post by hindsightbias »

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…

The product is becoming the Windows ME of Google.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#188

Post by blibble »

jameshart wrote: post #94

Something is, indeed, terribly terribly wrong in Google Maps algorithm land. For at least the last couple of weeks, Google Maps has been insisting that Basingstoke in England is called "Town Centre", and is one of the most important places in England. On a view of the entire country, it's displaying a label in the same font-size it uses for Southampton, Bristol and Liverpool marking Basingstoke as "Town Centre". Manc…

Basingstoke one of the most important places in England? pull the other one

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#189

Post by joosters »

yen223 wrote: post #101
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.…

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…

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...

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#190

Post by fragsworth »

Shish2k wrote: post #74
joel_perl_prog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. It doesn't matter how many smart engineers and ux designers can see the obvious, if one person from upper management can't :( (See also: G+ real names policy)

My guess is the original person leading the Google Maps project was very, very competent, and they either moved to another project or quit - and got replaced by someone really awful. I think it happened at some point pre-2013, because Maps was great until then, and has been in decline ever since.
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