I don't think it's 'hipsters' or young designers in general. I think situations like this happen when a bunch of people sit down in a room, and draw something up on a whiteboard. They draw all kinds of flow charts, sales funnels, color emotions, menu mockups, how X study showed 3% more users preferred the search bar 10px from the top, instead of 7px from the top, and how renaming the button from Search, to Go with a silly icon makes the company more human and will improve their image.
They get caught up in all these little details and studies, and on paper they can rationalize everything as being perfect. Then, it's a turd in reality, and everyone is left wondering what went wrong, the studies showed B was greater than A, and C was even better than B, and D surpassed C. So, how in the world can the original A be better than D? I don't know, but anyone in the design or development world can verify that it happens.
The Simpsons sum it up well in this episode...
http://i.imgur.com/VLgpw4L.jpg
The car is perfect, big windows and lots of sunlight, a giant cupholder, a horn that plays a catchy tune. Everything is great, until you look at things as a whole.
Now, my least favorite aspects of the new Google maps. I use it on almost a daily basis because I travel often, but I'll be trying to experiment with OpenStreetMaps, or Bing.
1. The search input box hides itself. Why in the world is the search hidden, forcing me to X out of directions to see it again?
2. The blue lines for directions make it nearly impossible to tell if the road offers street view. Mousing down on the little man produces blue availability lines, but you can't see them under the directions.
3. I don't believe it's possible to split directions and street view on the screen. This was the view I used most often. Splitting them side by side would make the most sense with widescreen monitors. Now, you just get a little map in the lower left, and it does a weird expanding animation when you hover over. Previously you could drag the little man to pan around the map, but now you have to keep clicking locations to move.
4. Images at the bottom. I'm here for maps, not images, so this makes absolutely no sense. The three little images at the bottom look like buttons for terrain, map, satellite view, bit instead they open these thumbnails. Now, you have to click the earth button to get satellite images, and the weird part, the image thumbnails at the bottom have separate visible/hidden settings depending on the view. If you close the thumbnail bar when viewing a map, then switch to satellite view, you would think it would stay closed. Nope, it'll open itself, because it's enabled on satellite view. You have to toggle it off on each view.
5. The top left dropdown. Way too many boxes expanding, collapsing, etc as I try to navigate.
My wishlist...
I'm just going to mention one thing, because this has bothered me for ages. Why the heck can't I customize the level of detail? There have been countless times where I just want to see countries and their names, or countries and capital cities. I'm looking at Europe right now, and it's not displaying half of the countries, but displaying city names all over the place. If I zoom in to see all the country names, the map is crowded with hundreds of cities and roads. I always end up doing an image search online for maps, because they achieve this most basic goal. Look at the below image. Google maps on the left. It still doesn't label the Czech Republic in that image. If I zoom out one level, it'll show the Czech Republic, but hide other country names, like Montenegro. Right is just a random map I pulled off an image search. The right map is 100x easier to see the borders and countries. Google maps is an absolute disaster in these situations. If I ask someone that isn't familiar with European geography to find the Czech Republic in the below images, they'll be scratching their heads with Google maps, unless they start zooming in and out hoping the name of the desired country pops into view.
http://i.imgur.com/skpNOyd.jpg
You can show me street view from a coral reef, or roads in some obscure village on a small island, but you can't show me a simple world map with country names? Where are the priorities here?
Edit: Switched my homepage to DuckDuckGo instead of Google search, and updated by bookmarks to OpenStreetMap. I'm honestly getting tired of supporting Google, since the list of things they do right gets smaller on a weekly basis. It's time I give someone else a turn.
