Maps has really become a chore to use, too. I remember getting directions used to be easy once and now it's like interacting with enterprise software.
It's like that person that your tough interview process is designed to weed out - looks good, but when you hire them and put them to work you discover that they can't code, just crib stuff from Stack Overflow and discussion boards.
With "Timeline," you dig in and find things that just don't work right like arrival and departure times (if you're going to show me at a location until 1:30PM why when I go in and drag the slider are there further data points bouncing around that location until 3PM?) and filtering of bad location recording (apparently I make several 1-minute trips a night 1 mile over to a corporate office park nearby with a cell tower).
The previous version was bad (or at least irksome and clearly designed and tested only by people on 4K monitors or with very odd mouse habits for the in-day timeline), but this one is worse because it SEEMS good until you actually look at the data.
How is it hard?
EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.
It's gotten leaps and bounds more useful than it was 4-5 years ago. Transit directions are much easier to use. One of the only things I can complain about is that on mobile, if I've conducted a transit direction search then the results I get are for the given time. If I miss a bus or don't leave until a bit later and want to re-run the search again at the current time (some buses may have stopped running if I get delayed leavng party for example), I have to actually input the time on my phone; there's no way to re-run the search with the current time.
It's mind-blowing to me that they wouldn't make it easier to have a transit search use the current time, and instead continue to use a route from anywhere from 15 minutes-3 hours ago. Why would I even be performing the search again if I wanted the same routes.
Loading GMaps takes forever now and brings my entire browser to a freezing stop (Chrome OSX) until it's done doing whatever it's doing. This is a modern desktop (i7, 16GB RAM, discrete graphics). Even after it's done "loading" if you try to interact with the map right away it does so at a crawl - inputs take multiple seconds to register and panning/zooming runs at about 2 frames a second.
It takes about 10-15 seconds after load for the site to be fully functional and performant. That's insane.
Ditto the Satellite view. Yeah, having 3D buildings is pretty cool and all, but the performance is atrocious on even fast, modern machines. If that's the tradeoff I'll take the 2D satellite imagery back please.
Overall interacting with GMaps is itself a chore, and it almost entirely comes down to bad performance. This is especially frustrating on mobile if you put the performance of GMaps on iOS next to competitors like Apple Maps - the rendering performance is insanely low even on the most up to date hardware like an iPhone 6s.
Beyond performance problems, one thing Google didn't fix until recently was that it was literally impossible to see information on an address/place and nearby transit at the same time. They changed Transit from a persistent overlay that can be toggled to a special view mode itself, which would disable itself the moment you clicked on any point of interest on the map. It makes me wonder if anyone on the Maps team lives in a major city.
I so much hate the "new" google maps ... anybody has a alternative ? Somehow, I like the tiles of google maps best :-/
It's hard to imagine that Google would make a UI that slow given their extensive optimizations.
They aren't testing their cool WebGL version widely enough, so it fails badly for many users. (Edit: or wait, is it just a 2D <canvas>? Either way, it should be fast in Safari and it's not.)
I'm with you on the "it forgets the transportation mode" complaint, by the way; even Google Now seems incapable of using it, despite being able to parrot back the setting in the config panel.
I can kind of see their reasoning, since public transport is often time dependent, but often I don't care about specifics, I just want to get an idea what links exist, and how long I'm going to spend in transport visiting a bunch of places.
http://i.imgur.com/SaHMCF2.png
Yes, there's a round "Directions" icon. This time. Frequently, searches for a given address don't bring up that icon or any other UI affordance that indicates how I might get directions to the destination.
However, Maps does reliably fill half the screen with photos, random chunks of white space, and other irrelevant visual junk as seen in the above screenshot.
I had absolutely no idea that Maps had a right-click menu, so thanks for that tip (seriously). Right-clicking on an AJAX-based Web page is obviously not a standard or expected UI concept... but given what Google has done with Maps over the last year or so, literally anything helps.
This is sadly a really common UX failure in a lot of different apps.
One thing that many people still don't seem to realize is that it's more important to be consistent than being smart. I like to call these "hide and seek" UI elements - they display conditionally in an effort to be smart (e.g., no directions are available to this place, so we hide the directions button). But in practice it just confuses users.
One thing I keep encouraging, to varying levels of success, is that UIs should always be consistent. If you are unable to provide a feature, disable that element with a helpful tip (e.g., graying out the Directions button and say "Directions not available from this address" or some such).
I know how to get directions in the new interface. I just don't like doing it. Is it more clicks? More elements taking up space I don't care about? Hijacking the native right-click menu? Aggressive resizing/panning when I didn't ask for it, to accommodate what it thinks the new context should be? I don't really know.
These are the obvious ones. There are more subtle UX fumbles too. If I click my house while I'm in my house and click directions, I probably don't want directions to my house. I probably want directions from my house.
Edit: Oh! That ridiculous thing it does when my phone vibrates. Someone decided they could detect frustration by using my accelerometer. Now any time I get a text message and am using maps, maps gets insecure and asks me to submit feedback.
I've started to use bing more recently.
This is clearly an intentional anti-pattern, and it's been there for over two years. I have to actually type, for example: "Fry's electronics, city, state" (remember, this is on a TOUCH KEYBOARD) to get where I want to go.
It shouldn't really be in debate that the UX of maps has gone way downhill. There's simply no comparison to the older version and I've never met anyone who wasn't disappointed by the changes.
I'm assuming you do have GPS location turned on, and that you're allowing location access on that page and waiting for a GPS lock before searching, correct? (And if not, how do you expect it to know where you are?)
IP addresses are usually enough to get to the right city.
If the website then how would it know your location if you don't allow it?
I also liked the one period of time I used to type in my US zip code for Movie Showtimes and somehow be routed to theatres and showtimes in a town outside Naples, Italy. This was on a desktop, not a phone.
Not the biggest deal in the world but it seems every useful thing Google comes up with seems to degrade in quality over time and increase in complexity.
Maybe another reason for the change is that, back in the Marissa Mayer days, hiring standards used to be much more brutal. Google was still reaping the rewards of bucking the trends of web portals jammed with ads, but eventually lost its confidence in nerd-driven products and instead began to imitate Apple, Facebook, and inexplicably, Microsoft...
My personal one is that they just can't stop tweaking. It's not like there aren't some fundamental improvements with a lot of their services but everything needs to get touched and then it ends up like that car Homer tries to design in that episode of The Simpsons.
I know that you're supposed to constantly iterate and try and improve performance, design, etc in software but is there anything in the general literature / case studies of 'improving' too much and degrading the core product(s)?
Not to mention that it's always funny to search for an issue on Google, find the links to the forum, see all the people that chime in with a similar issue, the few souls that try to help, then, as you scroll, the further desperate comments of "They don't care about us." Shouts in the wind.
One thing that is absolutely brain-dead is that (in Chrome) I can't type in maps.google.com and tab-search for my address. I can do this with Amazon.com or Netflix, but not an actual Google property? Weird.
Another thing that is just bafflingly absent is that GMaps doesn't know where my home and work are. Not just as locations, but as concepts. (Snide part of my brain wonders if the Maps team just lives at work.)
Another thing is that to make GMaps work with my Mac, I have to have a Chrome Extension to stop the map from freaking out. And then simple things like double-clicking to zoom in seems to have a non-predictable behavior where sometimes it zooms in and sometimes it tries to put a marker on the map.
Not everything in Gmaps is horrible. There are many nice features. But they've allowed the critical path through the software to become obscured and eroded.
Also I'm not sure but it would seem you have some kind of plugin that might be interfering as GMaps is very smooth on Mac Chrome and Safari.
And you might be single-clicking on the maps which brings up a gray marker to show you more detail of the nearest address to where you clicked. It's easier to just use the scroll wheel to zoom in/out.
And you can just put the address in the search bar and the first result on the results page should be the address detail plus links for directions.
Google Music kicks on my fan after a while. The only other thing I run that does that is Kerbal Space Program. One simulates space flight with nice (ok, decent) 3d graphics, the other plays f*cking music.
Works for me, and that's definitely one I've never explicitly set. According to my settings, the tab search just redirects to https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s
I know that tapping will drop a pin, and I don't want to drop a pin, (because there's already a pin from my search and that's in the right place) so I don't want to tap. But tapping is actually what I need to do to get rid of the interface and just leave me with the map. But only after I've done whatever it is I need to do to make the GPS dot active. I'm on a bus. The GPS dot shows me where I am. The pin shows me where my destination is. Maps also shows every bus stop (I complain, but this is one of the things that makes me feel like I'm on StarTrek) but you only get the bus stops if you zoom right in. So, I spend some time zooming in and out. The map images keep loading and unloading. I kind of wish Maps would realise that I need the bus stops. I know there probably isn't a setting for that (because FUCK YOU USER WE KNOW WHAT YOU WANT) so I just keep pinch zooming and unzooming, and hoping I don't miss-pinch and un-drop the pin.
Maps is great if you use it often enough to learn it. I use it just often enough to not remember it next time I go to use it.
(All maps are amazing. I remember using Autoroute from 5 1/4" floppies and a Hercules graphics adapter and that was amazing, so GMaps on that slab of glass does feel like magic. I moan too much.)
All adblockers turned off, no errors in JS console, no other extensions installed, regular maps works fine.
I want that feature, but that shouldn't entitle Google to have that data on their servers.
I have a very long time since I used it. (I still use Google earth too).