Google Maps will soon give you better recommendations
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Maybe it's because I'm using an iPhone 5S but it would still be nice.
It's not.
(I've been meaning to upgrade to a newer phone, maybe an LG V10 or V20, soon for several reasons; the S5 has been great but it's now 4 years old. But I guess Google Maps being slow isn't a valid reason any more.)
In a technical sense, both apps are displaying all the same kinds of things: satellite tiles, scalable road vectors, rotated outlined text for street names, 3D buildings if you like, etc. But Google Maps is dog-slow compared to Apple Maps at doing it.
Is efficient painting logic for a maps app on mobile a genuinely-hard problem that Apple Maps is being really clever at solving? Or is it an easy problem that Google Maps is being really stupid at solving?
If it's open in the background it's nearly instant to switch to it, unlike some other apps.
I'm on an iPhone X and just tested and the keyboard shows up immediately when I activate the search field.
I've used enough of Google's products by now to know that the word "better" in this title is probably inaccurate. :)
But I sure wish Google would stop trying to read my mind and just do what I tell it to. Guess the descent is inevitable, since we're the commodity we have to fight with the service, explicitly or implicitly. But oh how I yearn for the days of old when they pretended to be nice.
I founded a company competing with Google Maps on another level (map tiles & other geoservices), and I think it's super important to have competition in the mapping space (just look at how much it costs if you want to use Google's data anywhere!).
Your site looks super polished. Keep up the good work!
One thing I don't particularly like is having to sign in to see a map of things nearby. I'd love a main view that shows me just the map with interesting places marked as pins. (E.g., "Places Near Me" takes me to a signup page, which immediately turns me off.)
Best of luck!
I don't immediately see how your app solves the problem, it seems there are some lists of things, but it's an unqualified jumble. I am looking at the best bars in London list, and pretty much all my favourites are on there, but Gordon's, Duke's, Termini and Calooh Callay are very different places for different occasions (and, especially in the case of Duke's, different budgets), and there is nothing to help me decide.
Finding a bar, even a relatively good one, in London isn't a valuable problem, IMO, and certainly not one Google isn't going to beat you at -- finding a bar like Duke's in, say, Zürich is (for the particular subjective value of 'like' that I have in mind). A list of "that kind of bars" with a few options in every city might be a good answer, but I don't envy you the challenge of curating that sort of thing at scale.
Our stab at making finding places easier is to let people share their favourite places with friends (via lists) - you might not trust Google's bar recommendations, but you would trust your friend who goes out a lot and has a similar taste.
Are users really asking for this? I only ever use Google Maps for driving directions. I like that I can type the name of a place and it finds matches near me, but that's all the personalization I've ever wanted.
It's an awesome tool to discover things in a neighbourhood.
Google maps should be answering two questions: Where is it, and how do I get there. "What's cool and new in my city" seems like a feature that's being shoehorned on because it's a possible revenue channel.
>asking locals
I like that for hippie reasons like building community and a sense of connection to other people, but I'm also a little disappointed I didn't instantly recognize that the objectively best way to know "what the locals are doing in their neighborhood" is to "ask them"
No, Google Maps should be answering the questions users are asking. And, apparently, users are asking those questions.
When I'm on the bus I use Google Maps to tell me how close I am to the destination bus stop. It's not great for this. You have to really zoom the map in to get the bus stops to display. And the GPS positioning isn't great - often it'll show me travelling through the middle of a field rather than the road I'm on.
Take for instance my silly effort to get the assistant to help me out while I was driving on the highway a few weeks ago and had an emergency suddenly crawl up on me: https://imgur.com/v2Y1hsC
I didn't really expect that to work, but it would've been nice if it could've pulled up the closest business with a public washroom... I know Google maps is always asking me questions on that type of stuff.
Or the time where I hit the road towards a blizzard last winter and I asked Google to tell me what the highway conditions were like and I got some search recommendation for road conditions in a different country.
Maybe improvements to "recommendations" in general can solve these other problems that I figure are very navigation-centric in nature.
1) I generally don't want to do what everyone else in a given area is doing. I prefer the off-the-beaten-path stuff. Will Google know this?
2) Will Google monetize the inclusion in the "local hot spot tonight" recommendations?
Speed matters!
When I open it on a new, top shelf Android, it takes a few seconds to boot. And it boots directly into whatever I searched a few days ago. Then I have to click back, wait for it to not lag, back again, repeat. Then finally I can search. Most often I click back and close it...
Yelp took about a second longer on each step, with worse search predictions with partial string input, making me spend more time typing. Also the text is harder to read and the search box is harder to activate. So UX seems to also be a factor adding human lag time to the equation.
Maps isn't instant but it's the better of two nonideal options.
Yes, better restaurant suggestions is exactly what will make Maps more competitive. /s. The Valley Filter Bubble(TM) rears its ugly head once again.
Just giving people an "I don't know the area, please don't give me a route with a million steps and rapid fire turns when there exists an alternative with a fraction of the complexity that only takes several minutes longer" check box would differentiate them from every other consumer grade route planning software and make using maps for a route in an unfamiliar area (example use case: picking something up on CL) or when driving something bigger than a SUV in a dense city way less stressful.
A little warning that "this route contains under-height structures" (the location and height of which is publicly available) with a little icon on the map for each one would probably reduce the number of rental trucks, motor-homes and mini-buses that get can opened by an order of magnitude or two.
There's a lot of little low hanging fruit but reducing the number of routes your route planning software sucks at isn't as sexy as trying to predict what restaurants people will want to eat at.
Terrible UX, thy name is Google.
What I really want it to do is look at my calendar, and if I have something scheduled soon with a location attached, suggest providing navigation to that. This has worked sometimes, but it's completely not reliable as it sometimes simply doesn't do it.
What I really don't want it to do is blindly suggest navigating to locations I've previously been to. The last couple times I went to the dentist (something I do approximately twice a year) it's asked if I want to navigate there every day for the following week.
The only thing I've found (mostly) reliable about it is if I get in my car at the end of the day, the navigation suggestion is 'home', and in the morning, it's 'work'.
so many google products seem to reach EOL at "good enough". see also: Gmail, etc.
Instead of turning left at an intersection with a light and dedicated turn lane, I find it will often suggest I turn left then right then left to skip the intersection. It always turns out worse.
To reiterate, though: at least until a few years ago, according to PMs involved, Google Maps was tuned to keep directions shorter and simpler to read, describe (if you're a passenger) or even remember.
I find Google Maps _vastly_ underestimates how hard it is to turn onto a major artery without a light. It seems to think that turning left across three lanes of traffic without a light is "free". In practice, I have been stuck making these turns for 10+ minutes before. I've noticed it underestimates bridges as well.
> Sometimes it feels to me as if, over time, it learns from routes that it suggests and I repeatedly avoid, but that might have been just a coincidence and it might have learned that from aggregate data, not just mine.
That could be the case. Given my usage of Google Maps was less than once a month, it may not have had much to learn from me. I would also rate these poor experiences as bad.
Chicago
Maps already gives you route options to choose from, both when you first start, and during your drive; why can't they do this with toll roads? Are they secretly working with EZ-Pass?
I've the choice between toll-lanes or not on my way home, I'd love to know how much faster it'd take if I get on the toll lane...
But in that particular case, I'm not sure how that information is gathered in the first place, it might be hard for them to figure out which cars are on the toll-lane, and which cars are not since both the express lane and regular lane are next to each other.
Plus, while they aren't perfectly accurate, toll lanes are usually far enough away from the regular lanes that modern GPS devices in those lanes should be able to generally show themselves biased in that direction (relative to the devices stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic).
Google Maps will show you alternative routes as you drive, telling you how much extra time they'll take (or save). Waze does not do this, it only shows you one route. I frequently want to take a slightly different route than the one shown, perhaps because I'm coming to a stoplight and it shows the alternate route of turning right to be "similar ETA", and by turning right I can avoid spending 1-3 minutes at the light.
Basically, Waze is just too minimalist. I want more information, not less.
I guess all the more reason to continue using Apple Maps.
It is unfortunate that OpenStreetMap doesn't have the resources to create mapping apps at parity with Google Maps. I just want a map app. Not a recommendation app. Not FourSquare. Just comprehensive maps, routing, and possibly traffic data. OSM, please take my money for this!
The only way for us to receive long term value from digital tooling is through participation, resource contribution, and stewardship of organizations that can protect these projects (Similar to how Signal received a very large cash contribution for ongoing support, or how OSM and other renowned open source projects have official organizations formed, elected governance, etc).