To be fair, even Google has terrible UI/UX these days. Just look at Google Maps or Gmail. Material design isn't that great for discoverability either.
They rolled out a feature to limit search results to locations within your current zoom. Great! Problem is, they reloaded the entire page (not just the results partial) on every change.
The constant flickering made it very difficult to orient yourself around the map. Was infuriating to use and I'm very glad that they've now fixed it.
It is doable, but how is it supposed to be done?
(For context: IIRC there used to be a shortcut to navigation for that feature. And yes I think ux designers mindlessly copying each others or Apple are at least partially to blame.(
2. Ask for directions
3. Replace your location with y (or x).
4. Reverse start and end if necessary.
Personally I think is flow is better than directly entering start and end for two reasons:
- The common case (go from where I am to somewhere else) is faster.
- I don't have to think about how to enter "my location", which isn't obvious (over the years I've seen - typing "my location", searching with the start box empty, pressing a special button for the purpose, and others).
> - I don't have to think about how to enter "my location"
IIRC at some point this where solved rather nicely by offering you start location pre-filled with your current address.
This was on Android. Is your UX any different?
But usually if I want to search for directions not to or from current location I just search for destination and later just change current location to different thing.
What is missing for me is the ability to select time of arrival/departure for car navigation. It is useful to see how traffic is predicted to look like in advance. But you can get something a bit like this (with just enough advance) by creating event in calendar and using Google Now. It will notify you when you must go with taking traffic in consideration.
(For some reason it seems I only tried the search field and looked in the menu.)
And, yet, the maps themselves are worse: they changed the algorithm for which labels are displayed, making it impossible to cause some street names to appear.
But with the labelling change, it's impossible to coax out the needed information. Combine that with Google's exotic definitions of "sharp" and "small" turns and it's surprisingly inconvenient.
Add a route between A and B, then slightly scroll on the map. The context information disappears and once you get the bloody thing up again, how do you go back to results? It is infuriating.
1. In the most recent version, there is some action (I don't know which at the moment) which makes all UI elements disappear, and I don't know how to bring them back except by restarting the app.
2. My most common use-case is to search for some amenity within a certain area. So I pan and zoom to the area that I want to search, type in my query... and it zooms out to the city level to show me absurdly distant results. I can zoom back in afterwards and do "Search in this area", but it's still annoying every time.
2. That one is the most annoying thing for me. It usually happens if you search for something that it can't find in visible area, but it looks random. Google Search taught me that you can write a bit sloppy and it still is able to find it. Than in Google Maps it can lead to showing you some cryptic place in another country.
Another annoying thing for me is a language problem. I am living now in Germany, but I am from Poland. You can't do category search in Polish, because it will show you results in Poland. But at the same time if you look on details for the German place you will see category in Polish. So you may not know what Google expects.
Also when you click on category icon from search list (those red icons) it will search in language of the country you're in, but you have to click on a name in your language.
But multiple language support suck mostly everywhere... Chrome offers site translation (some of the time). I prefer translations to English, because they are better than translations to Polish. I also don't want to translate it always, because it is not always needed (and flicker is annoying) or not good enough.
To translate a site to English I have to do this every time (my UI is in Polish, but I will write all in English, but translation is mine):
1. Tap on underlined "Polish" in sentence "Translate to Polish"
2. Tap "Polish" in "Translation language" menu
3. Scroll to the top to find "English"
4. Tap "English"
5. Tap "Ready"
6. Tap "Translate"
7. Ignore annoying confirmation by scrolling or tapping "Ready"
At least translation from context menu is sensible now. You can select text by long tapping and tap translate and it remembers what language you selected earlier and has the most recent used languages at the top of the language list.
Take keyboard shortcuts - they're EXTREMELY undiscoverable, but they're not required for most operations, it's more of a power-user feature.
Not every feature does. But every function does. If there is no visual indication of how to zoom at all, there are users who will never even discover that they can zoom.
I've looked at the OnePlus 3, and it seems like a worthy successor. LinusTechTips on YouTube did a review on it. I'd recommend checking it out.
It's annoying as hell when you're holding a coffee and want to zoom.
In what way? If you mean one handed usage, it's pretty common here when people are standing on public transport, you need to hold on with one hand. If you mean the infrequency I need it, take a look through you're list of installed apps and tell me how many require zooming? Almost all are designed specifically to avoid it.
http://www.carlsednaoui.com/post/46803524724/google-maps-one...