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Comment by jahnu | Hacker News Reader

I’d like to see a defence of the reason why it’s so often a bit of a job to be able to read the street name… on a map. If only for the laugh I would have.

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The article complains about 'clutter' - but have you seen a traditional printed map like [1] ? Personally I find them beautiful, but it's a rather Jackson-Pollock-esque beauty.

One of the changes brought about by the digital mapping revolution was to allow much less visually complex maps.

[1] https://blog.az.co.uk/z-map-company-supplies-london-emergenc...

That's a bit offputting at a glance but I was quickly confident I could find the street name of any street I was in within a second.

Right but digital map allows you to zoom in and on street level of zoom there is no longer name clutter. There is no need to remove those details to just leave swathes of empty space

Because Google always wants to have its cake and eat it too. Every one of their product tries to be "smart", and it inevitably miserably fails. Google Maps tries to both be a normal map, and then a list of events and places around you, then a shopping guide, then... then it fails at all of these.

Letting you specify on Google Maps a kind of context that would swap between these at will would be an infinitely better experience, but unfortunately it doesn't grant promotions, unlike a blog post about the _brand new smart experience_

They have a blog post about it from way back. Essentially the map changes depending on context so you don't need to see store names if you are zooming down the freeway by the side of it, you might see road names if walking and navigating, but not if you have gps in a car, you might see more restaurants if you came to maps from a restaurant search context etc etc

Yes, Maps does it what it thinks the average mook wants, and refuses to do what the actual user wants.

My personal hot take on this is that this is emblematic of present day design strategy: first, abdicate responsibility for meaningful customizability (meaningful = anything but maybe aesthetic theming). “UI is hard.” Once you’ve accepted that it would be impossible to create settings that would be useful and worthwhile, then you just make a bunch of static choices based on what you think the average dummy would want, or write an algorithm to decide it all non-deterministically, which gives a small chance that it will occasionally meet needs more complex than the most basic use case.

Without a trace of irony: thank you for explaining to me why I fucking hate Google Maps.

Don't change the context and try to outsmart me without giving me any indication of doing so. Don't attempt to outsmart me without giving any recourse if I don't like it. It only ever leads to information I want to see being hidden. You, Google Maps, do not know what I want better than I fucking well do.

Exactly. Like for example if I'm the passenger and I do want to see the store names along the intended route, and even the ratings and reviews, while the driver is zooming down the freeway to make a decision about where to eat, without taking it off navigation mode.

Oh and not to mention that it sometimes tries to translate street names to my phone's language setting. Leave street names in their original language so I can match it up to the physical signs, goddamnit.

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