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Comment by coldsunrays | Hacker News Reader

> The new New York map above looks comically bad, almost like student-level work.

I found the new NY map refreshing because of its higher contrast between the streets and city blocks. Feels like it's easier to get a handle on what's on the screen. Granted, whenever a product gives me the opportunity to opt for increased contrast, I usually go for it.

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That's super interesting, because to me the new one literally looks like a captcha! It would be completely unusable with careful perusal, let alone glancing down while navigating. The words all have lines of nearly the exact same color overlayed so I can't read them without squinting and going letter by letter.

I found out several years ago that I have some form of color blindness - amusingly enough during a design review for a map we were designing. I had the exact same problem, with everything bleeding together in an indistinguishable mass, and everyone looking at me like I had 3 heads when I asked how we could possibly ship something so unusable with no contrast.

I suspect there is something similar going on here. To me, the foreground text and background roads are nearly identical in hue and saturation. Is it high contrast to other people? The map I struggled with years ago was using two colors with similar saturation but different hues (a purple and a green/yellow), so I had to push to make sure that "high contrast" meant a difference in both hue AND saturation.

Shipping a couple map-related products has given me a real appreciation for how differently users can experience visual layouts. For one thing, technical people generally like maps a LOT more than the general population does, to the point that we take it for granted that it's the ideal way of presenting anything with a position component.

Quite a lot of people get overwhelmed by maps - they basically shut down and can't figure out the UI at all. Looking at the new version gave me that panicked feeling that I hear those users talk about.

when I hear "captcha" I think of mostly black text on white background. The text is made hard to read by distorting the font, and possibly drawing a line through it.

So I find your analogy of "literally looks like a captcha" to be confusing.

To me that's what it looks like (minus the text distortion). The color of the roads is nearly identical to the color of the text, so it's text with a bunch of random lines going through it so that I can't easily read it. From other people's reactions, I suspect color blindness at play here.

Are the roads and text very different colors to you, so that you can easily read the text?

Yeah, I don’t know what the author is talking about. I loved his comparisons over the years, but Google Maps (and others, really) are atrocious to use because of extremely low contrast; the blue version is much better (even if potentially “uglier”)

For a product meant to be used outdoors, Maps does an awful job at being readable.

Interesting, do you mean contrast between non-roads and roads, or between map and text? I think (bear in mind I have some color blindness) that it's gone from a low-contrast road grid with high contrast text to a high-contrast road grid with low-contrast text.

It would be easier to trace the shape of the roads, but that's not how I personally use a map. I'm much more focused on the name of a neighborhood or the name of a road, and its relative position.

I regularly use the map to plan events and the inability to see roads clearly makes it difficult. Sometimes small paths won’t show up until you zoom in all the way and even then they’re kind of lost in the bad contrast.

Maps nowadays look beautiful compared to the old style paper maps, but are comparatively unusable.

I stopped using google map to navigate while driving due to the low contrast issue. I used to be able to scan the map and figure out which fork I should take. with the current google map, I have to stare at it for a fraction of a second to be sure. Now I use Apple map and works much better for me.

Seems like the road text still needs some fixing/adjustments, assuming they keep that light-gray blueish road color.

The apple map road color is a lot darker, creating more context. For the google map road color, they'd almost need to use something like a yellow text perhaps.

I find the new map far more cluttered than the old. You don’t want to see a dark grey line for every alleyway and minor path at the high level view. It just looks like a grey mess. The lack of contrasting colours between the main and minor streets (particularly interstates) is a massive step backwards and makes it far hard to plan your route at a glance.

Personally, I don't need to see every single street and avenue in high contrast, I'm more interested in the general layout and things around that area. I agree with the author, the NYC map is almost unparseable at a glance.

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