I don't have an iOS device so I can't comment on current state, but I hope this gets first class attention.
Another problem is that it loves to move your viewport -- sometimes just a small zoom out or something, but sometimes moving you entirely, or searching around your current location instead of in the selected map area. I would prefer it if every viewport move had a prompt saying "Hey, I'm going to move your map to some other area" and give me a chance to complain, or have some sort of seamless "save this view" thing that goes into a stack in the corner so I can go back to the view that I was looking at.
This is absolutely infuriating for trip planning.
If each query was a layer, you would also have a basic GIS. You could allow the user to start asking spatial questions, such as, "Show me where all the Chinese food restaurants (layer 1) Best Buys (layer 2) are.
"Hmm. I need to go to Best Buy but I'm flexible about food. Let's tap X on the Chinese food layer and search for Poutine restaurants instead."
Suppose you want to find things that match X near some landmark Y. As far as I know, you have two options. One is to search for the string "X near Y" and hope Google parses it correctly. The other is to search for Y, memorize its location on the map, search for X (which has a good chance of moving the map view to some random location), pan and zoom back to Y from memory, and click "search this area". It's a huge pain.
I'm stil amazed how hard Maps makes it to view a street name. I can fill my screen with a street and nothing else, and I still won't see its name. I feel like they actually do it on purpose to breed dependence on Maps for navigation references.
This is one of the reasons I prefer Apple Maps to Google's -- because IMO they do a slightly better job of that. Still wish it would be better, it's a daily nuisance for me.
> I'm stil amazed how hard Maps makes it to view a street name.
If its a fairly fresh app launch, default to around me
2. The lack of consistency is especially annoying. "Italian" redirects to Italian restaurants in my area, and the same goes for "Chinese", etc.
Do you want to take a shorter route? "No | Yes (auto selects in X seconds)"
I feel this is possibly the best way you can provide the options.
I think changing from your current plan unless you panicedly (and in my jurisdiction, illegally) press a button to stay the course is just generally bad UI.
Part of this is I just don't trust Google Maps' new route to actually be faster. It seems Google Maps doesn't properly weigh the cost of these items, which leads to it's suggested route usually being slower:
* Crossing bridges during rush hour.
* Making a left turn without a light across 3 lanes of traffic.
* Going down small residential streets that are too narrow to safely drive the speed limit.
* Routes that require turning onto a busy road without a light and the corner having really poor visibility.
[tap] Oh, sushi. Not in the mood for that. [tap] Oh, that's closed. [tap] Oh, that's too close to the one I already tapped, let me zoom in... [pinch] [tap] Oh, sushi again.
I'm genuinely surprised at how many people here apparently consider that a better user experience.
Or that Google (of all companies!) hasn't rigorously tested this and found that lists work better. They convey so much more information and the whole reason you're using a map is because you don't know where stuff is, so you're going to need all that information.
If you search for something like "McDonalds", you care about which McDonalds is easiest to get to, and you don't really care about anything else.
Even if I'm looking for something more vague like "restaurants", I still usually prefer to see everything laid out on the map, but that's because I usually walk places, so location matters a lot to me.
I absolutely cannot understand why this isn't fixed. This happens so often.
Being able to hover your finger over certain points and quickly browse the options on a map would be great.
With a mouse, the 3 actions
- hover
- click
- double click
Ideally, the actions triggered by them are extensions of the previous one, too. With the mouse, we have that:
- hover = tell me more, but don’t really do anything
- click = tell me more and select this item
- double click = look, select, and open this item
⇒ if we can’t get a real hover, in an ideal world, a softer or shorter finger tap, not a long one would mean “tell me about this”. I doubt we can shoe-horn that into the UI this late in the game, though.
We do. Samsung used to have this on their phones (not sure if they still do):
I really liked the idea (and thought the hardware was pretty good on the Storm 2), but was too unusual on too-unpopular a phone to do much of anything.
BB never really understood how to do 'experience' - except in things at their core like battery length and keyboards. As nuanced and insightful as they were there ... it's like they considered everything else a joke, or didn't want to go deep.
The whole screen on Storm moved - neat idea - should have never made it out of the lab. Or at least, not in the manner it was. It was possibly ahead of it's time as I could feasibly see Apple doing something like this - the new MacPro trackpads are very, very nice. So subtle.
But it's all history now :)