Software sucks
shitpost.plover.com
shitpost.plover.com
Even if a bug is fixed, the effort might be wasted when a large overhaul of the system happens because they want to add a huge feature, like a new searching system or some internal backend refactor. Fixing the bug might be much more difficult than you think due to the scale and complexity of their database or some other reason. Then the change needs to flow through the review and testing pipeline.
My point is to explain that software gets harder with scale, which might cause a bug like this to cost tens of thousands of company dollars to fix, while the benefit to each user (and therefore the company) would be a tiny fraction of a cent, so both managers and financially-aware engineers would easily brush this off as "not worth it." Any argument of the form "why not just fix it?" would be countered with "you could say that for any of the 40k open bugs."
Why not gain reputation and good will by making users happy and deliberately cultivating a reputation for low-frustration, responsive, thoughtful and reliable products?
Of course this is the opposite of “Get shit out fast, fix it later” and would surely be very boring to work on.
But even so.
Exactly. The answer to any complaint like the one described in this article (and I have similar ones about my phone all the time) is "how much would you be willing to pay to fix this?"
Of course, it doesn't help that, even if I were willing to pay to fix this, I have no way of doing so; even if, say, 100,000 or 100 million users would all be willing to pay to fix it, so that the amount in play might actually be enough to compensate a developer to do the work, we have no way of coordinating such a payment. That's not just because the companies involved are large; it's because the software running on, say, my phone is a cost center to begin with, not a profit center. The profits come from locking users into multi-year contracts, and "too many bugs/misfeatures in the software on the phone" is so far down the list of things the phone provider is worried about people switching for that there is no motivation to spend money on it.
> which might cause a bug like this to cost tens of thousands of company dollars to fix, while the benefit to each user (and therefore the company) would be a tiny fraction of a cent
But if there are 100 million users, that might still work out to a tidy profit--if the users could somehow coordinate the payment, and convince the company that the alternative to accepting the payment and fixing the problem was that all 100 million of them switch providers. In the real world, of course, this will never happen.
No, but we can always go and use another app that doesn't have as many problems.
What other app? What apps don't have random bugs or obviously insane behavior popping up when you least expect it?
He's trivializing it, but specifically mentions that including one 5.7 miles away would be fine. And then promptly says because he visited it before.
That's some complicated intelligence and pattern matching that he's asking for. What exactly should it be ranking by? Proximity and popularity and traffic density and Google rating and awhole load of other things.
The rules that Google apply obviously work for some scenarios, but not this one. Could it be better, obviously, but that's not a bug.
Probably still better than Apple, which pointed me to a 19-hours-away store when asking for "directions to Albertsons" a couple years ago: https://i.imgur.com/jSCrToj.jpg
What is hard about ordering a bloody list of places by distance?
>He's trivializing it, but specifically mentions that including one 5.7 miles away would be fine. And then promptly says because he visited it before.
Well, they could first add the bloody sorting, then we can think about whether they should mark or prioritize previously visited places (which itself does not take any "complicated intelligence and pattern matching" -- it's just persisting visited places and consulting their list).
My second point is also that even if they weren't (for some exotic cases) , the most common cases and sane defaults, remain trivial -- and anything else could be relegated to settings and the like.
My third point is also that no matter how easy or hard the complicating factors, a screen like the one shown by the poster, is an utter failure.
To continue on this 2nd and 3rd point, it's like people are trying to defend Clippy, the office assistant, by saying that "AI is hard".
It might be, but getting Clippy out of my bloody monitor and not having it disturb me when I try to compose a Word document, is very easy. MS could always do that (and that's what they ended up doing).
Especially when you add in rankings, you start having to think about sorting by multiple layers, circles of distance with ranking sorted by that.
So the really good match 20 miles away is shown lower than the pretty good match 5 miles away, but they're both shown above the bad match 7 miles away.
And that's before you add categories, past history, any paid ranking, etc. And then the queries get really expensive and you've got to decide what to fudge or not to keep the system responsive and stop your search system eating all your CPU.
And you can bet people will still find scenarios where they'll say "why's it doing this? I'd expect the order to be different".
This is pattern matching and value assignment, something humans are amazing at and computers aren't.
It already prints a distance.
It could use that. Or, if it is some kind of point to point distance, it could calculate a driving distance and use that if it wanted to be extra smart.
Add the type of place it shows, and be done with it.
>Especially when you add in rankings, you start having to think about sorting by multiple layers, circles of distance with ranking sorted by that.
We've been doing multiple criteria sorting for millennia. It's not rocket science either.
>So the really good match 20 miles away is shown lower than the pretty good match 5 miles away, but they're both shown above the bad match 7 miles away.
Why is one "really good" and the other's (that are also of the same store) not? They are bloody stores of a franchize.
Don't try to be clever and define what's "good" and just show them to me sorted by distance AND type (in case there's a city called that too or something). End of story.
>And you can bet people will still find scenarios where they'll say "why's it doing this? I'd expect the order to be different".
People might or might not say anything. But way fewer will be confused by a distance sorted list + an indication of what the item they saw is (store, city, village etc), than with this clusterfuck of a result.
How does a computer know that searching "Wawa" means you want the store and not the town? You haven't even considered that. It's a search term.
And a really good system would clearly takes a load of things you're not considering into account, relevance, rank, personal relevance, historical relevance age, etc. A really good system might even helpfully try to include traffic density, how busy a store was, etc. What if all the stores near him have 1 star google reviews? What if some of those Wawas are paying for adverts and some aren't? What if some of them have opening times set up, and some don't?
As I say, their ranking system might be working great for other things, but something like this it spits out crap.
Well, no reason to calculate 10 million. If another way to select a list of top suggestions to show is less costly, you can just calculate the distance for the existing suggestions they're already about to show - and then show them sorted by the distance).
Having the unknown criteria they used to pick the suggestions reflected in the order they show them is not useful to anyone though.
>I'm not sure why you had to exaggerate "millennia".
Not exaggerating -- pointing to the fact that we know techniques to do it, and we have been doing it (obviously manually before computers) for millennia.
>How does a computer know that searching "Wawa" means you want the store and not the town? You haven't even considered that.
I did, and I mention it in 2 places in my response above: they could either sort all by distance and display what each entry is next to it (e.g. town, store, etc), or give sorted lists for different types of results (e.g. locations vs businesses).
>And a really good system would clearly takes a load of things you're not considering into account, relevance, rank, personal relevance, historical relevance age, etc.
Whatever the above system "took into account" it failed. And it's a case that's common to 99% of the population (search for a business). Searching for a location is another 99% common case.
Historical relevance and age? Who cares besides tourists (and even them, when they're not searching for a location or a business but for sightseeing)? A system should have sane defaults and hide those other things under user enabled search/sort criteria.
For fascinating essays on digital maps, this site: https://www.justinobeirne.com
Related to your question:
Google Maps’s Quiet Transformation (2017), esp. the second half of the article https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-appl...
Surpising Changes to Google‘s Cartography (2016) https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps
Why are Google Maps’s city labels more readable than those of its competitors? (2010) https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-label-readability
This is a big pet peev of mine. I optimize for easier driving; less turns and less stops over saving a minute or two. But as smart as they try to be, they never seem to learn anything from _the route I actually take_. You'd think the Google lady would catch on that; when he drives home from work (5+ times a week) we always recommend that he take this Avenue but for some reason he always goes out of the way to take the Highway and I have to recalculate. I'd think they'd analyze every "recalculating" as potential bad advice and learn from it.
In many cases, I think defaulting to the list makes sense because of the extra data it has. For example, I'd rather go to a restaurant that has a 5-star rating and is open now as opposed to one that is rated 2 stars and is closed, even if the 2-star restaurant is easier to get to.
Is it? Showing the pins on the map seems like it would show you roughly the same distances but with the added information of direction and area.
At worst you might eyeball the distance wrong, but does it matter if something is 3.5 miles away or 3.6 miles away?
Most of the time I search something in Google maps I want to see the relative area so I can make a choice based on route and whatever else is near the location.
I guess it comes down to how likely you are to rely on Google map ratings/info. If I'm searching for a restaurant, I generally trust Google's location information, but otherwise I don't trust their ratings and store times to be accurate. Other people could be different though.
Conversely, if I'm on the way somewhere, and I want to add a stop using the "add stop" feature, such as a gas station, then it sorts by the amount of extra time it will add for each stop, as well as showing the pins on the map. Since I don't really care where I go, as long as I get gas, this seems like a reasonable compromise. (It also puts the gas prices on the map, which is nice.)
However, perhaps I am a happy-path user, or have been trained over time to use the application as the developers intended. Regardless, the current behavior works well for me.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I typically only use my GPS while walking, but now I'm thinking of a use case where I couldn't stop for a few seconds and pan around the map with a finger, and I think I would want a list in that scenario.
The place literally across the road from me is a screen down the list (on mobile) because it's got lower reviews (by about one star or so) than the place 7km away which is at the top of the list.
For the search "wawa" it doesn't make a lot of sense to prioritize history over distance, because Wawas are nearly identical. But for "farmer's markets" this would probably be a useful feature.
Figuring out how to differentiate between those two examples algorithmically is super non-trivial though
Source: Just tested this in-app.
I get that Google's all about saving clicks now, but I've noticed between maps and other apps (Google Music comes to mind) the extra inference sometimes just makes me scared to click on things.
Can you at least long press or something to remove a location from your history?
Google has a user history website where you can see everything they recorded from Search and other apps, and you can delete the entries
But at least with AI there's something marginally close to an excuse, because you need a ton of data to make it work. With maps it's just plain and simple bad UX design, I can't think of any reason why locations shouldn't be sorted by last visited instead of last clicked.
> Google has a user history website
From a usability standpoint, if it's not accessible from the same same interface where your results are displayed, then it doesn't exist.
Maybe he looked at a location first for information, and to know where it is, and needs to look for it again at a later time to actually go there.
I'm worried that there could be people who were in a hurry to get somewhere and perhaps wound up in a grave instead because they felt the urgent need to look away from the road and fiddle with their phone to reset their map destination while on the highway.
Are you sure you're not confusing that with rerouting you based on traffic? And that the extra driving was done to get around a traffic jam?
EDIT: Are you tapping the map while driving? https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/maps/LqK7zqz6...
Also, why are people using Google Maps instead of Waze for navigation?
I wish there was as good as maps paid alternative. I'd gladly pay for something other than the ever slower with each update Google maps.
Uh, no. If I want to go somewhere, I'll ask you, Google Maps. It's shit like this that makes me glad I switched to OsmAnd (despite the latter lacking in features, such as finding an optimal foot/bus/train route).
Could be an interesting design approach to know which locations are "fungible". I.e., one Wawa is as good as another, but your parent's house isn't a replacement for mine [1].
[1] I'm sure your parents are very nice, of course :)
> Last time I asked for directions to a Wawa, it was to the one on Oak Lane, 5.9 miles away. Why doesn't it guess that I might be trying to go back to the same place?
Also, I am just speculating as someone who has had similar problems... I did not contribute to this app.
Another common case is the history of your behavior is fully remote and your instantaneous connectivity is out-of-sync. So the map falls back to this kind of primitive state more similar to TomTom rather than being intuitive and catered.
I take it you're not a developer?
The thing with most software, just like ours, is that many of us engineers don't have the deeper design knowledge to really understand how a product needs to be build from a user's perspective.
That is to say, users know when they don't like something, but they are often wrong about why they dislike it or what is interrupting their workflow. Our job is to find and fix the root cause starting from user feedback, and fix the product in accordance to what the user is actually trying to accomplish.
This is often very hard
I honestly don't know what the solution to this problem is, since feedback is invaluable. I guess, always be careful?
http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer
I suspect there is a lesson there about using aggregate feedback, rather than listening to single individuals.
So while a design may not make sense right away, there may be other factors at play.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/vv5jkb/the-secret-ways-so...
Cached version from Google: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:E3wiNT...