Google Maps: Which Highway is Which? | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps: Which Highway is Which?

41latitude.com

21 pointsj0530039 comments

While I agree Google Maps aren't perfect, it isn't because the Google Maps team is dumb.

Would you believe it's hard to render perfect street maps? This isn't a million monkeys with crayons... they have a very nice set of cartographic algorithms that make stunning maps, and every street isn't going to be perfect.

The blog post is glib and doesn't say anything more than "this looks bad, fix it."

There was nothing in the article implying in any way that the Google Maps team is "dumb".

The article is about a real usability issue that exists in Google Maps--a product released over 5 years ago and that has long been out of beta.

This isn't really a problem, though. All you have to do is zoom in, and the ambiguity resolves itself.

The post (not exactly an "article") comes off as a silly complaint that Google Maps isn't completely perfect, without seeming to understand that something as complex as this can't be perfect. There are always going to be trade-offs, and the label locations Google Map's algorithm chose seem perfectly reasonable to me for the zoom-levels displayed.

Why isn't it a problem? It makes the maps confusing.

In a lot of cases "this looks bad, fix it" is the correct response. If you look at a problem from a naive engineering standpoint and imagine the mountain of work it would be necessary to fix it and then weigh that against the seriousness of the problem before ever lodging a bug report you'll probably decide that a lot of problems aren't worth fixing, and thus aren't worth even mentioning.

But this is wrong. You always need to keep aware of all the defects and problems with your system even if you have no intention of fixing them now, or ever. Having a thorough understanding of the limitations of your system can give you the impetus for a redesign. And it can also give you the clarity to be able to push for fixes to these problems in the future after redesigns, likely for completely different reasons, make the solutions tractable. Otherwise you just end up in an increasingly deepening pit of mediocrity that you never escape from while your competition pulls farther and farther ahead.

Yes, how dare a user point out a flow in the product! Right?

Completely useless article. If you're going to criticize something, present an interesting solution. Otherwise, stop trying to increase your hit count.

I do agree that the labels can be confusing and should probably be changed to the same way roads are handled: text perpendicular to the road, making it easy to distinguish.

The solution is pretty obvious: don't put highway labels on top of intersections.

zoom in. problem solved.

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