15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps | Hacker News Reader

15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps

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265 pointsJohnHammersley252 comments

My biggest gripe is trying to read road names.

So many times I'll see a road name, and I start to zoom in - only to have it now disappear - to then zoom out again and it doesn't show at all - to zoom in again and then 50/50 I can see it.

Drives me nuts.

Where I'm living (Indonesia) most people reference parts of town by the major road nearby. I try to learn where the hell I am in a certain new locale by looking at the road name (They aren't often seen on physical signs, either) and it takes me forever to find it. Doesn't help that it's a regular practice that the road name changes after some time, even though it's the same road.

That happens for businesses too, it's maddening!

Yeah, I zoom in all the way to a building I know is a business to look up opening times etc, but the name just doesn't appear. I don't get it.

Now they can sell advertising to businesses and guarantee improved CTR.

The same with contour line elevations. They are unreadably small, and when zooming in enough they just disappear. Hate it.

Google has contour lines ? What i really hate on google maps is that you have no idea if a city is on a plane or on the top of a mountain.

there is a Terrain layer if you want to see the relief

Yep, I zoom in on a road name all the time in order to make it large enough to read... only to find it disappear (or even more bizarre, change languages).

Aside from that, it's a little wild to think that after using it for 15 years, Google Maps still prominently features 'Gas' and 'Hotels' buttons on my screen even though I'm looking at a map of the 5km directly around my home and I don't own a car.

Fuck these guys, I'm going to download OpenStreetMaps and give it a whirl tonight

Remember that OSM is just the map, not a piece of software to access it. Organic Maps is one of the most popular phone apps for that.

Ah yes. I often use Maps when I have a rough idea where to go, but I just need to commit the street names of a few turns to memory. Finding those names indeed tends to be a frustrating experience.

You could ask for directions and look at the steps.

That some times works, but the references I'm interested in aren't always the one directly on the route. For instance, the name of the street just before the one you need to turn into can be helpful to remember. Also, if it's a list of directions I no longer have the context of the actual map, so it's a subpar solution regardless.

Same problem here. In the UK, Maps often shows the names of every road but the one you're on! The only way to show the missing name is by zooming to the max, very awkward.

Or it shows the road number and not the name.

Yes, another frustration.

Feels like they don't want you reading the road names, and use the navigation system instead.

I came up with an approach for placing labels where each gets a min zoom to show up at such that there are no collisions and always appears beyond that. Personally I like the feel of it a lot better, but the downside is that at a given zoom labels are less dense than if they could show/hide to fill in empty spaces. Also, it makes it impossible to dynamically style the labels, or rotate/tilt.

Demo: https://msbarry.github.io/maplibre-minzoom-demo/world

I zoom in so far the only thing visible on the map is a stretch of the road I’m interested in and the road name still doesn’t show. As a programmer I cannot fathom how they could have a bug like this year after year.

You've never had a bug stick around as not prioritized for year after year? Just wait, you will :)

Yes but I don’t have a zillion dollar dev budget.

They probably changed its status from "Bug" to "Feature" ...

Really!? I see the opposite problem. https://shot.3e.org/ss-20231124_081012.png

Same problem with elevation markings on terrain layer.

Reminds me of navigating with maps and sometimes despite that stretch of road having a local name, they use the route number, so instead of "Turn left on Happy Street" it is "Turn left on Rte. 401"

Drop a pin. It sucks. I know.

This is one of those comments I'll think about hundreds of times, followed by remembering how dumb I feel right now, that this has never occurred to me. Thanks for the tip.

Add engagement intensified. Promotion unlocked.

This particular color change is not very popular inside Google during its dogfooding and received lots of feedback, but yet the product team decided to push this. I don't know what happened in the team internally, but it looks like now those product people care less and less about internal feedback from arguably most enthusiastic users.

That sounds like most internal feedback since Google+

It's completely wild to me that the maps org has more than 10,000 people.

If they were just developing software that would be way too many, sure.

But if you count streetview car drivers trying to drive every street in the entire world every few years, people manually moderating crowdsourced contributions, people updating the map for all new construction worldwide, people working to maintain business listings for every business with a physical location (including those without much web presence), people dealing with adversaries who want to list their fake '24 hour emergency locksmith' all over every city, people parsing train and bus timetables in every city worldwide no matter how awful their websites are, an advertising sales team specifically targeting smaller businesses who are interested in local advertising...

Nokia Maps (I used to work there) when they acquired Navteq back in 2006 or so was something like 7000 people or so, most of them in Navteq. Navteq had employees and people in most countries in the world to be able to gather mapping data and work with local authorities. It's now called Here and they still have 9000 employees or so (in 2019 according to wikipedia). That's after years of decline and layoffs.

The Navteq acquisition is what prompted Google to create their own maps. They were licensing Teleatlas (now Tom Tom) and Navteq maps before that. Apple made the same move a few years later. I think Steve Jobs was still around. I bet Apple has a few thousand people working on this topic as well.

That's just what it takes to build and maintain a world map and assorted geospatial technologies, datasets, etc.

PMs need their promos

I personally really hate the water and street colors. Awful stuff.

I love the new water colour. It reminds me of my holidays in the Mediterranean; Mallorca, Sardinia…

In the end it’s so subjective that not everyone will be happy.

> but it looks like now those product people care less and less about internal feedback from arguably most enthusiastic users

Enthusiastic users aren't the people you should design for - instead target changes that have the greatest positive impact for the most users. There could have been a compelling reason like color requirements for accessibility or how they display on low end screens for NBU that negates a bunch of memegen posts about how pretty it looks.

...or it could just be hot garbage. The new colors don't have enough contrast, especially at night.

I notice that maps.bing.com doesn't have the same problem. I guess it's time to test drive it for a couple weeks.

>There could have been a compelling reason like color requirements for accessibility

that seems especially unlikely. the problem is inability to differentiate between things, most accessibility issues in maps are inability to differentiate. Changes that make it harder to differentiate will not improve accessibility.

> Enthusiastic users aren't the people you should design for

They are the people you design for at the beginning to get traction, and once you got the mainstream on board because of their evangelicalism, you switch targets.

Aka, the enthusiastic people get used first and then dumped.

My pet theory: They pushed it because it more closely resembles Apple Maps. When I opened Google Maps earlier this week, I genuinely thought I'd opened the wrong map app.

And you did.

I think they want to push users away so they have an excuse to EoL Maps.

All design people live in Macbooks and iPhones, so every UI not following current Apple theme feels off to them.

Really? Google created their own design language and guidelines: https://design.google/

so it can't be all Apple's fault.

It's not Apple's fault, it's the desingers who use apple products. Look at youtube account linked to that page and tell me how many Windows computers can you see there: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ21zHI2TNh9clapWNyWU...

I've also seen this trend, and if you hate Apple style UI (like I do) this trend is infuriating

The new version doesn't show most of the street names. Not even the major roads.

Screenshot: https://i.ibb.co/qszKNSm/google-maps-labels.png

Example URL: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5041929,-0.111821,17.46z

I've noticed that. I zoom and zoom and zoom, yet the street name is not appearing!

I guess there is no money in it?

Can't Google just show a damned ad when the street is zoomed in far enough to have room for a video and the name?

I worked at a mapping sw company (not Google Maps, but a 3p competitor) and the designers hated street name labels. I think they thought street names uglied up their carefully beautified cartography. Every time there was a conflict between a street label and say a POI icon, they wanted the algorithm to choose the icon. The PM also favored POIs, especially if the icon was $ponsored and brought in revenue.

All the map apps seem to be bad this way. Use Apple Maps and pick a spot with a lot of businesses like the Las Vegas strip. You’re not going to see too many street names winning the algorithmic decision of what to display.

Maps has been pretty transparent over the years of transforming Maps into a destionation for Places, not just to browse, or look around, or sightsee. You open maps, find a Place, and go to it.

> I worked at a mapping sw company (not Google Maps, but a 3p competitor) and the designers hated street name labels. I think they thought street names uglied up their carefully beautified cartography.

Why the hell don’t they just expose an option “show as many street names as possible”?

> the designers hated street name labels. I think they thought street names uglied up their carefully beautified cartography.

This is the part where they should be reminded they're designing a product that should be useful, not a work of art. Label-less street names are fine on posters or those metal-engraving sheets you can hang in your living room and marvel at the grid structure.

> The PM also favored POIs, especially if the icon was $ponsored and brought in revenue.

Oh I see why the designers aren't reminded of the above.

Funnily enough you inspired me to try Apple Maps and it did a better job. The last time I ran into this issue I didn‘t even think about Apple Maps since it’s much worse in the things I use Google Maps for in my location. But now I know where to look up street and river names.

I assume the thinking is as follows: street names mattered on early paper maps, and printouts of online maps, because people would navigate through areas by comparing the street name on the map to the street signs around them. That generation is now aging. Whole new generations have been brought up who instead navigate by searching for a POI or address, and then simply following the line or the voice guidance that the map app creates to lead them to that destination. The latter users may not know or care about the names of all the streets along the way.

Sure, some people want to look at a map with street names just to become familiar with the whole town. But those users are probably too few for a company focused on profit to care about, and such independent-minded users might be harder to monetize anyway.

The problem with that reasoning is that GPS/compasses in phones are often wrong, so it helps to have the spacial awareness to know that you're on the north west corner of Delancey facing north, so you need to turn left to start heading west on Broadway. This is especially true if you're in a dense area where GPS gets especially confused, or if you're trying to catch an Uber (since now there's two potentially faulty GPS's in play).

I often have to zoom in obnoxiously far to read the damn street names. It's quite frustrating and could easily be solved with some sort of tap to display name feature.

I don't particularly like the elision of street names myself, but is GPS on modern phones really often wrong? Perhaps it's more an issue in rural areas or super tightly packed areas like SF or New York? In LA, GPS is kind of crazily accurate, and other than routing choices that can seem strange, it seems to work perfectly.

Compasses on phones are definitely a crapshoot though.

GPS has issues near skyscrapers ("urban canyons") because the signals reflect off buildings and don't arrive at the proper times. You can correct for this with multiple frequencies or if you have an accurate map of nearby building heights.

The only place I’ve had severe gps issues was when visiting NYC. Too many tall buildings. Very little line of sight to a satellite. Plus reflections from buildings. It was frequently off by entire blocks. Found ourselves frequently ignoring the blue dot on the map.

I do encounter compass issues all of the time though. Almost always it starts perpendicular to where it should.

> so it helps to have the spacial awareness to know that you're on the north west corner of Delancey facing north

Most of the people I've questioned on this struggle to figure out where the north west corner is or what direction north is etc. And yet they can still navigate in dense urban environments perfectly fine.

How? Landmark based navigation. All you need to do know is [some big landmark, like central park, or the sea] is behind you. Now to get to your destination, you want store X on your right and move forward. Turn right at store Y, etc. This is the reality of how a lot of people navigate and I think the new map reflects this.

> Landmark based navigation. All you need to do know is [some big landmark, like central park, or the sea] is behind you. Now to get to your destination, you want store X on your right and move forward.

Yes, but one very important and ubiquitous landmark in urban environment is an intersection. Two roads intersecting create an unique point that's easy to find (follow one of the roads until an intersection, then verify by checking street name plates). It's exactly for this reason you'd want a map to always show you street names.

Google Maps doesn't. It also doesn't reliably show most other landmarks you'd care about, like stores or monuments. Google Maps just plain sucks at being a map.

Couldn't we have a toggle option somewhere? Just a checkbox for "show all street names"... it can not possibly be that difficult.

My spouse can testify, I get furious when I can't see the street names. :)

It is, in fact, extraordinarily difficult to format street names well, especially at ever-changing zoom levels. What would it look like if you look at the whole city with "all street names" enabled? If you can't actually show them all, how do you decide what streets to drop? What if there's a small but important street, or a street with a long name that doesn't fit? The edge cases are numerous.

Agreed, we don't need "show all level of details" when that's not tenable. I'd just prefer Google Maps to be a bit more "dense" when deciding what zoom level to show details at. This is particularly a problem with maps locations-- it's far too easy to get the incorrect impression that a building you are looking at is entirely a Denny's when in reality it's a strip mall with 5 businesses if you zoom in a little closer...

Every OSM-based mapping programming I’ve used handles it basically fine. Considering the amount of resources Google has, I find your claim pretty ridiculous. Google is actively choosing to hide street names and actively choosing not to provide an option to override that. This is quite clearly a business decision of some kind. They could certainly do this if they chose to.

Let's start with the simple rule: if a street name is big enough / important enough that Google Maps would consider showing it, it should show it. Always.

Unless you're pulling up to meet someone and need to tell them where you are, or calling 911 and need to tell them where you are. In those situations I want a street name fast and these issues can be quite frustrating.

Or in short: Google Maps isn't a map, it's a turn-by-turn nav that pretends to be a map.

A good digital map is a stellar tool for orientation and discovery. Google Maps isn't, because orientation and discovery goes against pushing you recommendations (read: ads). They don't want you to have spatial awareness - they want you to blindly follow paths that make them money.

Especially in more rural areas, you're often given directions where to go based on things that aren't addresses that Google Maps would understand. Being able to open a good map and ask questions like "is that the one after Midler Avenue?" helps you drop a pin on the map, and then use the new-school navigation.

Also, it used to be that if you search "[street name] map" in Google Search a very helpful Google Maps image appears with the street nicely highlighted. At around the time of the Bard rollout they completely broke this functionality. Now it's returned only in a much inferior form not least because of the lack of street names. Some screenshots for comparison:

https://imgur.com/a/K4oAbZs

That doesn’t look so bad to me. The old one looks more precise but the new one is perhaps easier to take in at a glance.

More street names would be good in both versions, but it doesn’t look like that has regressed, at least.

The new one hides that the street is one way.

If you zoom in, the map shows the street names. I suspect it's only a change in "what resolution should show which names".

That is decidedly not always true. It would be cool if there were some zoom level below which names were always displayed, but there isn’t. Especially in dense PoI places.

Sometimes you can see some street names, but not others. So you have to play this game of constantly zooming in and out in different locations to figure out the names of all the streets.

I came here to complain about the old version often not showing street names, forcing me to scroll a few miles down some streets to see the name. Amazing that they managed to make that worse.

Here‘s the same spot in Apple Maps: https://imgur.com/a/PBFIP1d

It seems to do a better job at always showing street names if you are zoomed in. I didn‘t even think about using Apple Maps when I ran into this issue but it seems to do a better job at this.

I recently had a problem with data on my phone, so part way through a long car trip I had to use OSMAnd over Android Auto. Normally I only use that when hiking.

It was wonderful! All the roads had high contrast with the background, so in a dense and unfamiliar city "in 500m turn left onto Smith Street" was so much easier! With a brief glance at the screen I could see how many streets there were, and they were labelled with their names. It isn't perfect, but it showed how bad Google Maps had become.

I used it for the rest of the trip.

Google had white-on-beige for streets, so the displayed map was essentially useless. The new colours look like a small improvement.

Edit: I tried to find a screenshot of OSMAnd, but nothing looks like what I saw in the car. I don't have a car to check, it was only a rental. Maybe it was like this picture in the documentation: https://osmand.net/docs/user/navigation/auto-car/#map-appear... but I thought I had it in light mode too.

Changing the default color to teal was a huge mistake IMHO. I have been using Google Maps since its inception (18 years!) and this was a most unwelcome change. They could have at least gave us an option on which color scheme we want. Where’s Steve Jobs when you need him?

what we need is skins and themes like... winamp!

Winamp was the perfect combination of UX and skeuomorphism.

It kicks the Llama-7B's ass!

Milkdrop for Google maps: incoming!

Taps "Time Walk" and pulls out Jon Finkel's Tinker deck

You jest but it's 100% doable. If I had a spare couple of months I'd build a UI for this on openstreetmap.org.

(How you'd do it: move osm.org to vector tiles, use Maplibre GL as the rendering library, enable users to upload and select their own JSON stylesheet, build some sort of rudimentary sharing facility so you could use others' stylesheets)

The teal color is a strange choice because it feels early 2000s. Old phone screens just didn't show darker colors as well.

That's what I felt too; the color choices feel very dated to me.

Why does it feel like precious few UXs are meaningfully configurable? I see endless discussions at work on how we should tweak UI details, and every time I mention "why don't we just let the user decide" I get unanimously shouted out of the room. What am I missing? Is it that much more work? Is a consistent theme/brand-feel that much more valuable to the business?

adding configurability means maintaining lots of different possible states, which may interact with each other and have unexpected emergent effects. This slows down future development and attracts users who lose their minds when you break their pet feature.

Some software has succeeded going down the path of high-configurability (mostly FOSS like vim/emacs/sublime/vscode, Calibre, rainmeter), but the prevailing school of thought nowadays is more Apple-esque: you should design software that has one "right" way to do things and adjust that one happy path based on user telemetry. Everyone who doesn't like your One True UX will come around if your software's value proposition is good enough (or at least grit their teeth and keep using it), so it's not worth the effort to create and maintain a bunch of configuration.

Having a "right" way to do things also makes it easier to maintain design which meaningfully guides user behaviour. The interaction between design and user experience is quite complicated, and multiplicatively so with >1 UI options.

What's multiplicative about being able to disable/hide "hotels" button and make it smaller by removing the text?

The craziest thing about this change is that it just looks like Bing Maps now. (only half joking)

I thought I'd accidentally opened up OSMAnd on my car's screen the first time this new color palette changed.

Turns out OSMAnd still looks better

I think the widgets are important. One of the primary ways I use Google maps is to punch in new directions quickly while at a red light or something. I want to press one button. The “home” and “gas” buttons help here. I certainly do not want features “buried” in the app where I need to tap more things frantically. I think the map is the most important thing, and the current design reflects this, but it isn’t SO important that everything else should go away.

I don’t really care what a designer from 15 years ago thinks. The current designers do a good job.

So you break the law using your phone while driving (depending on jurisdiction).

At least in my jurisdiction (NSW, Aus), you can use and interact with navigational tools while driving.

So you're just aimlessly driving around somewhere unfamiliar and suddenly think "I want to go home!"?

Yes. You've gotten out of the underground parking garage, have good GPS/cell signal again, and want to go home.

Even when I know exactly where I am going and the route I want to use i'll often map it anyways so I can find out about traffic or accidents ahead.

> i'll often map it anyways so I can find out about traffic or accidents ahead.

You mean doing the very thing Google Maps sucks at - i.e. being a map?

I have an offline-compatible osm-based map app that can do useful stuff like routing without network connection. Of course it doesn't know about changing conditions ahead, but on the other hand it's nice that it never gives up on me, it can always do its job.

So why not set your house as your destination in google maps before you start driving? Then when you emerge from the underground parking, you will have signal again and it can route you correctly. Why do you have to set it once you are already driving? How does that help you?

Something else I don’t love from looking at my neighborhood is that Aldi gets its own pin/emphasis. Not the important municipal buildings, parks or school.

Her most basic point about the water and parks says it all. There’s a lot of existing visual language around this stuff that could be drawn from. Things going back hundreds of years. But I guess a fucking pin for Aldi speaks volumes about where the real priority is for this „product”.

Anecdotally I’m way more likely to care about a grocery than any of the locations you’ve mentioned.

The goal isn’t creating a historical representation of where things were.

It’s supposed to be functional.

> It’s supposed to be functional.

For whom? Aldi who is highlighted? Google who is paid? Or the poor suckers trying to find something?

A subtle dark pattern that Google uses is that they have roughly one size of POI, so there isn't enough space to show everything, or most things, it has to pick and choose. That artificial scarcity is tied to the profit motive (pay for prominence) and is user hostile.

Sure, grocery stores are most common, but often you're looking for something else. Using small icons, smaller text, or some other UI affordance to facilitate finding what you need nearby, quickly and without text searching, would be great, but isn't in Google's interest.

> A subtle dark pattern that Google uses is that they have roughly one size of POI

How many useful sizes could they have on a phone?

> the profit motive (pay for prominence)

Can you pay for this?

> Can you pay for this?

Yes - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9934637?hl=en

I think this opinion is unnecessarily cynical. The people who navigate to school tend to have one or two school per year. They learn the route by heart mostly. Schools are not interchangeable for the one attending them. On the other hand, I don't keep track of grocery stores, and I'm much more likely to look for them on a map (especially to plan where to stop by along the road). There are more likely explanations here than to immediately jumping to the cynical interpretation.

Why if you look for "restaurants" it will show you a restaurant that is 5km away and not one that is 100m away (but is indeed in the db)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38401345

“Follow the money” is _not_ a cynical interpretation. I’d go so far as to say that ignoring the money is entirely naive.

Fair, but one aspect of functionality is highlighting local landmarks like schools, so a viewer can more easily get their bearings.

Next to the Aldi there is a large grocery marketplace/bazaar that’s far more crowded - that isn’t marked with a pin at all.

Point being - Aldi is paying for this service. The map is skewering reality.

It’s not about historical representation, it’s about the fact that map-making has been around for awhile, and there are some great existing techniques for presenting that information that could be drawn on. But no, let’s melt colors together and highlight corporate chain stores with pins.

Likewise here - as you zoom in, the default pins show this tiny bakery before the huge grocery store everyone uses. The grocery story shows up at the same time as a really random set of apartment buildings.

The goal is different for different users of the map, as this thread pretty clearly demonstrates.

But it's 100% fine that Google Maps isn't the all-singing all-dancing maps app for everyone. Other maps are available. Plurality is good.

Perhaps more people actually search for the Aldi because they're passing through and don't know or remember where it is, or because they're looking for operating hours and other information. Most people go to the same schools & parks, nearest their homes, on a regular (daily/weekly) basis, so they don't need directions.

"Perhaps". But it's quite optimistic in 2023 to think that Google or any major company is using their data for your benefit.

I'm pretty sure they want people to use their products. Making it useful helps that cause.

Nah, they do their little dirty tricks all the time.

For example they decide which hotels/restaurants to show in an area when you search. They won't show all of the nearby ones. They might show one that is 5km away and not one that is 100m away.

Once I was in a restaurant that was not in maps. I decided to add it to the map when I was home.

Turned out the place was in their database, but they just decided to NOT show it, even at maximum zoom level over it. But when I added it, they asked if it wasn't that other one that already existed.

Moral of the story: use openstreetmaps.

> Turned out the place was in their database, but they just decided to NOT show it, even at maximum zoom level over it.

I have the same problem with my barber shop of all places. Even though I've been there probably a hundred times maps never shows it no matter the zoom level, I have to search it by name to find it.

My cynical view is they once said no to a promo offer for ads and are now punished for it.

> My cynical view is they once said no to a promo offer for ads and are now punished for it.

This is my suspicion as well. In the end it is very dangerous to let google decide which venues get business and which get hidden completely. Eventually paying google maps becomes akin to protection racket.

> But when I added it, they asked if it wasn't that other one that already existed

Is it possible that Google legitimately thought there was only one business at that location?

edit: to be fair I just tried searching openstreetmap for "flowers" in a small town I'm familiar with and the results were bad. It zoomed into a two block area with a single flower shop even though many others exist outside of that area. Even in that zoomed in area I could barely see the flower shop on the map because there is no label/pin.

Yeah „people” actually being corporate customer and the „products” being marketing and positioning of this corporate brand to the users.

> important municipal buildings

No such thing exists.

At least it's a real store getting a pin. When I open up Google maps I get a screen full of "Bob's Custom Homes", "Linda's Chocolate Tasting", "Ted's Towing", "Local Auto Detail" all pointing to residential houses in a very residential neighborhood.

The biggest new thing that I’ve noticed that I was waiting for, but they finally did, was put advertisements for places on your route as optional stops

To me, that’s the kind of thing that says this is no longer going to help me actually achieve my goals, and is going to start challenging my ability to make decisions unimpeded

Over the last few years it's been moving away from providing maps. Seems like management only want to provide advertising, and follow-my-directions ... It feels like "do what I tell you and buy what I tell you", not what I want from a map!

Even before the current design change, it was almost impossible for me to navigate using Google Maps. With OpenStreetMap, it's easy for me to extract the features of my surroundings:

- The shape and size of houses. Yes, you can see individual buildings in Google Maps, but they are almost indistinguishable from the background.

- It tells me at a glance whether some area is a forest or just a field. Everything's just the same color in Google Maps.

- Streets that I should probably not set a foot on (highways) have a distinct color. This is really bad now with the redesign.

- No problem figuring out if an area is serviced by trams or trains, you see their tracks clearly and don't need to zoom in looking for individual stations. Again you can extract this information from Google Maps if you squint, but tram tracks next to streets are almost invisible.

Especially with this update, prominent colors are given only to streets, which may make sense if you use Google Maps in your car. But as a pedestrian or cyclist, all the other information about my surroundings is much more important to me.

>It tells me at a glance whether some area is a forest or just a field. Everything's just the same color in Google Maps.

Thank you. Everyone is talking about the color of the water or the roads, but this doesn't even bother me. But having all vegetation of any kind in the same color is an absolutely mind-bogglingly stupid decision. I can't be the only one who uses Maps to check the extents of a forest, for example. Or who uses shapes of different land uses to quickly orient oneself on a map.

Yeah, it's quite clear the designers have never lived outside lived of a car sewer. Every justification they've given thus far circle back to contrast for road features and while driving. It's peak car brain.

Car sewer? Car brain? Wow, didn't know we had zealotry and disparagement over _choice of transport_ of all things, generally a matter people have little choice in; it's determined by where you live and what sort of life you have.

I think the map view is missing a mode view.

Directions has mode because they are very different for car, bike, walking and public transportation.

Map view for biking should be very different from map view for cars as high ways are not usable for bikes and bike paths should be more prominient (while useless for cars).

Ditto for walking that also have different paths.

Using the map for "getting somewhere" is a very different purpose that "seing what's here". They need different modes.

It's not missing it, it's called "Layers" and they can highlight transit, traffic and biking.

Unfortunately the biking Layer also doesn't fix any of this. It only appears to highlight "cycling-friendly" streets here, but the results look random at best here.

Sounds like a data problem over a software problem.

The fact that what the cycling layer shows to me is useless is a data problem, yes. However, As I mentioned in my comment above, as a cyclist I care about seeing a visualization of my surroundings. OSM tells me at a glance if an area I want to cycle through is a forest, if there is public transit, etc. None of that is part of Google's cycling layer, or any other layer - apart from transit. But the faint lines added by the transit layer are not helping, either. The maps are an unreadable low-contrast mess.

> Especially with this update, prominent colors are given only to streets, which may make sense if you use Google Maps in your car. But as a pedestrian or cyclist, all the other information about my surroundings is much more important to me.

I wrote an entire thesis about how much google maps sucks, particularly for non-drivers, and it still manages to shock me when I (very rarely) open it.

I don't mind the widgets, but agree on the colors. The water being teal and non-built areas being mint looks both unnatural and has worse contrast, at least to my eye. It's like they wanted to go for a pastel theme but didn't dare go all the way.

At least there's always the 3D globe/satellite view, which I still think is a marvel. Especially if you're looking up walking directions to somewhere unfamiliar, since you can rotate around and see all nearby buildings, landmarks, etc. hope they expand the coverage!

To try and remove myself from Google as much as possible I've been trying Apple Maps again after previous bad experiences, and much prefer it now. The only exception is place information, including opening hours etc, for which Google is much better. I'm pretty sure the difference is to do with incentives, where Apple isn't trying to sell ads in Maps. That seems to have lead to things in Google Maps like location pins outcompeting basic information like road names, which doesn't happen in Apple Maps. There's clearly a trade-off there, that I think Google has started to get very wrong.

For what it's worth I also don't like the new colours. I guess people will get used to it after a while, but I question the wisdom of a change like that in a situation where colours have meaning - there should be a very good reason for that kind of change, and I haven't seen anything to back that up. If anything the opposite where, for example, route information is harder to see in dark mode.

OsmAnd is fantastic if you are looking for a Google Maps replacement and much better at navigation especially for biking and walking

If you're in a city which supports it, the best non-driving maps app is CityMapper. So, so, so much better at public transportation and blended trips.

Yes, it's bad, and yet another example of a very public, beloved and well used service by Google being "improved" away by some PM to get that promotion, thereby making it worse, with no option for a user to even revert back to the old design (lest they challenge the SV-career man's assumptions that 'It's better this way!')

Google is by and far the bigget culprit at this tactic, and it's getting very, very tired. I hope the team responsible for this change reads this: You made one of your best products harder and more inefficient to use.

I agree the new design is awful. Admittedly I was used to the old scheme. But to me the new one feels worse. As the article suggests water and parks blend together. Now to much stuff blend together. I also use the topo overlay and it had some sort of weird banding to it that makes it hard to look at. Definitely feels like a step backwards

Having worked on Maps myself (as well as other stuff at Google): you're exactly right. It's make-work. Fixing things that aren't broken, so the PM, UX, and Eng leads can say they did something and get promoted.

To be fair, the same process has been underway on MS Word and Excel for 30 years now. Simple things (like designating the top row of the spreadsheet to be a non-scrolling header) should be simple, and they're not anymore.

Freeze pane...you're so right about that one. Every time I want to use it, it's like a 5-minute needle in the haystack search.

It's not complicated, it's right where it should be, it just has a label that somehow manages to be both highly correct in a technical sense and completely unintuitive to anyone who doesn't already know what it's called.

It's not only that, but also the way the ribbon UI resizes when things don't fit on screen all at once. You never know, if there are functionality that's missing from view.

YES - The ribbon UI has been around for ... what, decades, now. And it's still less usable that regular menus :(

Maps is not run by a man (except philosophically speaking). Perhaps the contrast was adjusted because of the emergence of P3, XDR, OLED, Liquid Retina, etc. Trust me, Google is very lucky to have her magic. ;)

https://youtu.be/dX3k_QDnzHE

> thereby making it worse, with no option for a user to even revert back to the old design

This makes me wonder if Slack hired a bunch of PMs from Google recently.

I suggest it is wrong or even dangerous to plot unauthenticated sites.

For example: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9465831,-2.6376033,18.96z?... shows "Crafting by Steph" in the middle of a road that sees at least 30,000 cars per day. Steph will be hit at 20-50 mph.

Here: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9461045,-2.6390567,42m/dat... There is a business called "Napoca Taxi" listed.

That area is actually a grave yard.

I agree with Elizabeth Laraki - the colours are wrong on G maps

Are we using different apps?

I have no trouble distinguishing between land and water, including greenspace. Train lines are much easier to see. Roads have been better broken down and are easier to understand for a pedestrian. The lessened contrast between different types of terrain makes it easier to tell how to get to locations and where locations are. They pop out more. The functional requirements for maps are discovery and navigation, both of which seem improved in this ui update.

I like the new update and I think author needs to let her cynicism aside and focus on the fact that a product revitalization is almost always due.

I find the contrast of the colors is much better when driving now. Things seem more bright/neon in a way and things actually seem to blend less for me. I was pleasantly surprised by the update.

I don't hate the colours and they're now closer to real street maps. This is of course a subjective opinion as I haven't put the new colours into use to see if the desaturated scheme is more glanceable.

However there are examples of the night mode driving directions having unintuitive colours: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/17yv4qp/...

In this example the bright blue route (matching the directional arrow) is actually the optional path, the true path is the softer blue colour (as signalled by the turning direction at the top of the screen.)

I disklike it. It looks dead. It might be better for driving, but not so for things dealing with nature.

Also I get the feeling that smaller streets disappeared, forcing me to enable the cycling mode.

Yeah, I find the new colors (and fonts!) a massive improvement in readability, especially while driving. It's so much easier to get situational awareness, recognize crossings, road exists and important landmarks.

But I did share the opinion of author and whined about it like a good HNer when I've only seen the blog post and before I actually tried it.

Anyone else notice how Google Maps has indexed everyone's covid cottage industry LLC registration? It's like I can't view any neighborhood around me now without people's random consultancy, auto repair hobby, travel agent gig, Etsy store, etc. cluttering up the map! Super annoying!

Yes, very annoying. But I suspect it's the business owners that add them. If you see stuff that's online only (shopping sites) I think it's fair to report them.

Meanwhile, bugs galore.

Since last month, any time I am looking at Google Maps, the podcast or music playing in the background will stop every few seconds. Not with navigation directions or review open, simply looking at the map it just grabs exclusive control of iOS audio for some unfathomable reason and plays nothing.

Add to this the years old issue with inability to remove hundreds of old starred places. You can remove them using the app, you can go to starred list in web GUI and do it from there, but they all come back.

But yeah, someone decided it was worthwhile to spend the time on the damned color change.

GMaps still have strong points, like all the integrations that result in mostly correct regarding public transportation routes around the world or the review system which I am sure is a pain to keep up with the amount of UGC they're getting.

People don't use Maps for navigation alone as of now. I use those overlays a lot on a day to day basis and burying them under some gesture is a terrible suggestion. The product has evolved a lot since 2007 because user needs have changed towards discovery. Also as an outsider we do not have all the UX research that goes into a product and this is reflected in design suggestion changes made related to a lot of products.

When I read comments to posts like this, what amazes me is the level of denial people have about huge corporations. It's just not possible to do a rework like that, there is no one who can decide on that, no one who knows exactly what strings have to be pushed (all the platforms, all the teams, all the application layers, all the documentation/PR/support layers), no one who has time in daily work to see it all through, no one who can take responsibility if revenue slightly dips, no one who can approve this and take responsibility if the guy who has the plan in mind quits, etc. Sure, some high-level manager has formal power to force this, but how will he or she make sure it happens exactly?

Now would be a good moment for OpenStreetMap to make the Tracestrack Topo layer their default view — it's much clearer than their current default; even more so when compared to Google's attempt.

=> https://www.openstreetmap.org/?layers=P

Won't happen as the default layer has mapper feedback as one of the explicit goals.

How does that layer hinder mapper feedback if it becomes the default?

The current default layer [1] has a short 'turnaround' time, meaning that changed tiles are quickly rendered, giving very short feedback time. The Tracestrack Topo is provided by a third party, without explicitly stated re-rendering turnaround times.

[1]: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto

> As far as I can tell, Tracestrack’s style is currently a closed-source style, which makes it an unlikely candidate for a default layer.

See https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/osm-carto-maintainers-... for a bit of discussion on this on the OSM community Forum.

The google maps visual design always lacked contrast to me. I don't feel anything for the new design, but I will definitely not miss the old visual. Weird they waited 15 years before trying to better it.

A bit off topic but I didn't know that on X people can post this long form texts with images in between (it seems that lacks headings). Is nice! A blogging experience added to a popular platform. I guess is a paid feature, fair to me. Also I don't have an account and I'm able to read it.

Some years ago I appreciated the character limit of Twitter because people have to be creative and to the point to express themselves, but with the years I start to thinking that this limitation was also a curse for communication overall on the platform.

> the years I start to thinking that this limitation was also a curse for communication overall on the platform

I would say the popularity of Twitter and its 140 character limit were a curse for communication fullstop. Globally, and irreversibly.

Facebook gets a lot of flak for being an echo chamber with targetted ads and disinformation, but Twitter never got the same level of critique in damaging online discourse.

Twitter specifically required people for a long time not to have long well-thought out ideas - but require hot takes and nothing else. Every political, social or economic position that was discussed had to be distilled to 140 characters - this effectively scrubbed nuance from any position. Along with retweets, this meant that all news, and all online discourse was reduced to "the hottest takes" without any level of complex thought.

Twitter is probably relatively most popular in Japan, and 140 characters is not a problem in Japanese, so this wouldn't be a global issue.

I think they doubled it to 280 forever ago anyway.

I absolutely hate this post. It's reasonably well structured because the author really cared & clearly spent time structuring it. But having a bunch of smaller posts comprising a thread would be much better blocking for me.

I don't log in, so I can't read the comments, but it also is sorely missed that I can't see people reply to specific ideas or comments. It's all just a soupy unstructured mess.

We already had blogs. Why we'd take a medium built for interaction & turn it into a place for long winded things that should be articles or blogs doesn't make sense to me.

Ugh, I hate those overlays. I remember when user testing was going on. My comments were ignored. Make the map a totally separate element that can be primary. Everything else is slow nonsense.

In 2009 I had extensive conversations with the design team. The scale device is a critical feature for people who want to use the maps app as a map. Google's response to it's removal then was they expected people only use the maps app as a "background upon to place directions." That's why they only display major street names, only display ranges in the context of directions and keep removing the scale device.

It's not a map application, it's a wayfinder.

Is it a competition at Google on who can come up with the brightest and lowest contrast map colors? Maybe it’s like a rite of passage…

This is also how a map could look:

https://postimg.cc/fVZvw8qJ

Main roads and buildings are both yellow? It would be better to make one of them purple or something.

I personally find these examples much more practical and easier on the eyes. Traffic lights and roundabouts are marked. Main roads have bold edges, ALL ROADS ARE LABELLED.. Street numbers are shown at regular intervals!

https://www.mapsbookstravelguides.com.au/wp-content/uploads/...

The CTA (Chicago public transportation) has maps like these up at every train station and every sheltered bus stop: https://www.transitchicago.com/maps/downtown/

They are a bit too cluttered. Its like "find Waldo" all over the map. These make sense at a high-zoom level where you are trying to find a specific house, or something within a few block radius, but not at a higher zoom level.

The colors are a bit too bright for my taste. Also not color-blind friendly.

High contrast is more colorblind friendly than having low contrast shades.

This is that map, by the way: <http://kartor.eniro.se/m/SC0qM>

Google maps have been terrible for years. (The actual map part and UX interactions.) Lack of detail is astonishing. At this point it's just a glorified car navigation, where the road is everything, and anything else is just for show/illustration/gray/green blur, I suppose. (I don't drive.) Green color means absolutely nothing useful. It can be a forrest, field, or a pretty much anything.

UX consists of annoying forced zooming around during menu/UI navigation. I often just want to exit a search context, but not change the map zoom position, and select something else on the map. I constantly struggle to keep context, when this auto-zoom/sift happens. I mean if there was some checkbox to decouple menu navigation from map control, that would improve the experience 7fold. Show me a fucking arrow on the screen edge if the POI is out of the viewport, but don't shift the map to a supposed "better view".

I have quite a bit of pent up rage towards this stupid app, that I sometimes have to use because local public transport relies on it. UX right out of hell.

These changes don't even register for me as significant degradation of UX.

Their wider strategy was pretty strange too. I especially boggled at how they bought Zagat to help with trusted restaurant reviews, ran it into the ground, then sold it again.

Checking my memory on Wikipedia, I just learned that they did exactly the same to Frommer’s! Although in that case it was less than a year before the Frommer family bought the name back.

> UX consists of annoying forced zooming around during menu/UI navigation.

This is extremely irritating. The fact that turning your phone sideways and then back doesn’t take you back to your original position is just amateur hour. The fact that turning it sideways doesn’t keep the map centered is amateur hour.

Personally I’d like to see an option to just turn off auto zoom entirely except as a result of an explicit search. Google maps _always_ gets it wrong. I am zoomed in on an area and click that I want to start a walking trip and it zooms out and shows the whole city. I mean seriously is anyone an Google actually testing their product? I understand that it’s not actually a map app and instead an app meant for car navigation and advertisement of POI, but seriously just allow some options to override things like auto zoom or an option to actually display road names densely, and they’d have an actual map app again.

> UX consists of annoying forced zooming around during menu/UI navigation

This drives me bonkers and nobody is talking about it.

You plot a public transit route and see something along the way. You click on the marker and nothing happens because there's a route active. You hit back a few times and your map pans wildly around, losing whatever you wanted to see.

In every discussion about Google Maps, I feel obliged to mention that it does not show speed limits in Switzerland, despite the official support page[0] saying otherwise! Isn't this insanely beautiful/ridiculous that nobody seems to care?

[0] https://developers.google.com/maps/coverage

It shows the speed limit for me (I'm Swiss). Not sure if only on selected streets or everywhere.

Are you in a big city? For me speed limits appear the moment I cross the border to Italy or get off the plane in UK, but never in Switzerland (or Germany where I have also checked it). I have the setting enabled and everything.

Speed limits have started showing up for me in Switzerland in last few months, so it seems like something is moving.

Having said that, they're commonly hillariously wrong. No, I don't think those tight mountain roads have limit of 80 (especially after just driving past a 50 sign :P).

I wonder if having even the lesser used stuff like restaurants, gas stations etc. on the main screen has to do with people using the maps app directly while driving instead of android auto. Burying those in the app might not be wise.

The parks, forests, fields, and woodlands around me now are all the same colour. At least to my eyes it's just a sea of mint-coloured blobs with no distinction whatsoever...

I don't see a single improvement with the new colour scheme, the lack of contrast also makes the built area around me almost fade into the mint-coloured blobs.

I like the old color tone better - but Google Maps has been going downhill since 2014-15

I haven’t used Google Maps in probably four or five years. Apple Maps doesn’t track me, Google does. And if I can navigate the maze of obscure privacy settings across my Google account, I still don’t trust myself to have done it correctly or Google to respect setting. Apple Maps is sufficient for my driving needs, and is more accurate and provides better routes than Tesla’s infotainment option.

On a side note, I haven’t found an easy way to use Google search logged out, but have a Gmail tab open. After months of irritation, I signed up for Kagi once they lowered the price for unlimited searches, and haven’t looked back. My personal and business Gmail accounts are my only Google ties (plus YouTube for the kids), and honestly I feel more secure this way.

How do you get it to stay logged in or the Kagi token to persist? It stays on mobile but every freaking time i use it with their browser (Orion, which is objectively sweet) on Mac, it wants me to relog in on Kagi.com or whatevs

If you select Kagi Search in Orion, you should have the option to enter your token.

I meant like I do that all the time but ill be damned if i have to "log in" to use my broswer lol

Interestingly, Gmail seems to be the easiest major Google product to replace with an alternative, particularly if you’re willing to drop a few bucks a year.

> On a side note, I haven’t found an easy way to use Google search logged out, but have a Gmail tab open

Firefox container tabs are ideal for this kind of thing

In Switzerland with have the swisstopo map which is really good in term of readability. I often refer to it to explain what a good map is.

Same in UK with Ordnance survey ! Maps that actually let one navigate the world, rather than only via roads

""" Here’s how it could look: - Keep the search box - Keep the bottom bar - Remove everything else from the map """

If you followed these suggestions you would end up with something that looks very much like Apple Maps

Google has still not recovered from the internal cultural disaster that was material design.

The Apple Maps UI is so much better than Google Maps.

Am I the only one who is upset about this ”replace every button with obscure icon without label” trend? Seems that Google and Facebook are the main culprits of this. Every year it gets more disgusting when I unwillingly have to use their services.

Yes - the fact that the suggestion removed the useful words for people who don't interpret samey symbols all day spoke volumes.

I prefer it. Why waste screen space on words? Icons are easier to see and use less space.

The only time you need the word is the one time when you don't yet know what it does. I would much prefer to RTFM one time then save that screen space.

In my favourite UIs I don't have any buttons on screen at all, but I do have an array of buttons on my desk (all labelled with letters, but their functions change depending on context). That's not really possible with a portable device, though.

At night the design choices are really bad. The active route and the alternate routes look so close in hex color, it's made me drive through the wrong wrong twice in the last few days.

Example: https://twitter.com/chinmaymaps/status/1725752799944663443/p...

You may think it's easy to differentiate in the screenshot, but look at it on a small phone screen at night while driving.

I hope Google changes this

I’m confused, I don’t see any alternate routes in that screenshot?

OK, I wasn't going crazy then. I had recently used Google Maps for a road trip that I was planning and I asked my GF if it looks weird. My initial thought was if someone changed my monitor settings. (I use different one for just gaming) . The design and graphics reminds me of Apple Maps a lot(the mac version). The look and feel was slightly off and it felt dullish. Not sure how I can explain it.

The suggestions are definitely good in the post. I like to have a clean maps panel and rest can be hidden away.

It's only after reading the post do i realize how shitty and cluttered the UI has become.

> The map should be sacred real estate. Only things that are highly useful to many people should obscure it.

This got me thinking. It would be neat if apps could adapt their UI to the features I use the most. Not what most people use. What I use. Rather than finding the UI that pleases the largest number of people somewhat, create adaptive UIs that fit my usage patterns at a highly granular level.

I was thinking the same thought like 10 years ago, and I even forgot I had the idea back then. And now with all the other (especially hardware) enhancements — which I think is way more complicated! — I’m surprised it’s not a reality these days. I am sure this is the Way.

Yikes, I did not realize how bad it’s gotten. You would think someone would have decided against the pallete change, but I guess not. Looks like they’re being beat by apple ux wise for maps right now.

Nitter: https://nitter.net/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182

I love the update, love the widgets on the screen and love the new colors.

Remember how Maps marks walkable centric areas of interest in yellow? It's now almost indistinguishable from the normal building colors, in the sun on your phone you definitely can't make out the difference.

I was in a new city last week where this feature would have been useful to explore the city center but I just wasn't able to see it.

I see lots of complaints about street names not rendering, and that has been a problem for me as well. The tweet author has a separate thread about how India doesn't routinely have street names, and how that lead to a design change for maps. It's super interesting!

https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1719379064564166772

EDIT: The following link is among the replies in that Twitter thread.

Anatomy of an Indian Address [50th Edition] [AUG 7, 2023] https://newsletter.theindianotes.com/p/anatomy-of-an-indian-...

As I wrote on the other discussion for this same tweet:

I don't see how the color scheme change helps with accessibility and readability. Okay, maybe the contrast with road names was bad before, but the major point was that important roads (like avenues) were highlighted in YELLOW.

Now every road is the same color and you can't distinguish between important and secondary roads.

They sacrificed usability for "readability". They could've achieved a mix of both (maybe change/increase street name?), change the font color, but the issues still remain. You must zoom in to see a road name and it doesn't work most of the times.

Don't remove the text from the icons. I have no idea what the proposed buttons do, and since the icons changed i can't even reference the bad design.

But i agree on the colors. It is just not nice to look at.

If you don't rely heavily on car navigation (sorry, no live traffic) then give Organic Maps (https://organicmaps.app) a try.

I think Google Maps mess is partially due to PMs beholden to some OKRs.

Stepping back a bit I wonder how much inconvenience do these people inflict upon us. Think about it. You rolled out a mobile app for a business/device/whatever. Best way to boost installs and impress your manager? Artificially gate features behind it.

Stupid question: but how do you search for something along a specific route? The search nearby thing never quite works for me, it keeps zooming out / clearing, I never got the hang of it.

For me (on android) it works by selecting a route, and then while you are in the overview, click on the 3 dots on the top right and in the dropdown you can select "search along the route"

The huge missing part is customization : give users easy as stable way to clean up your garbage, and you wouldn't need to wait 15 years to complaint about obvious UI design fails

It seems that every element is now pill shaped. What went wrong with rectangles with slightly rounded corners?

Are they going to get the top and bottom curved out as well and give us oval next?

I wish open street maps had vectorized maps instead of the tiled images.

Google maps is in need of real competition. It feels stagnant and regressing over time.

Several companies have osm vector tiles, mapbox among them. Osm.org isn't really for end-users, the focus is on mappers.

Does he have any pull with the current team? Because God damn, the new color scheme is hard to read. It's so low-contrast all the roads and grass and water look like one big aqua smear.

For me Google Maps has sucked ever since they merged Maps and Navigate into a single app, preventing you from using many Maps functions while navigating somewhere.

Yesterday Jonathan Blow was complaining about some Maps app on his Twitter feed, but not sure if it was Google Maps or another product.

I do agree Google Maps can be annoying to use. But other Google products get more annoying to use as time goes on as well. I have huge annoyances with Gmail and Google Calendar. This in context of my iPhone SE (which, I guess, has a "small" screen size, so perhaps related to my issues).

- Every single time I visit the Gmail login page, it always tries to upsell me to use the freaking app, that I don't want to use.

- At least on my phone screen, the button to dismiss the upsell page is covered by other UI elements. Only way to get rid of it, is to refresh the page. Not sure if this is a dark pattern to nudge people towards the app.

- I have multiple Gmail accounts (2 company accounts from different companies, my own company account, a private account and a spam mail account). Sometimes I am logged into one Gmail account and want to see the calendar for another account. It's very hard to use the top right button to switch accounts. Inside web-based calendar app almost impossible.

And an annoyance I have in general these days, with many web-based apps, is the constant security crap to deal with (2FA stuff mainly).

... I long for a simpler web like we had 10-15 years ago ...

Why not just use the Mail app to access your Gmail account and bypass the inferior web interface altogether?

Actually, I use the Mail app for a single email account (my own private email). I just don't want to add all company email addresses to the Mail app. This way I have a better separation between work and private stuff. As in: when I check email in the Mail app, I am not confronted with work stuff.

Some of us think that the mail app is the inferior.

Search on the app uses my phone’s cpu. search on the web site uses their cpu.

Guess which is faster ?

- At least on my phone screen, the button to dismiss the upsell page is covered by other UI elements.

I find this to be incredibly common on so many sites on mobile. Cookie popups or "subscribe to our newsletter" popups where the dismiss button is either missing, hidden or rendered off the bottom of the screen, with no ability to scroll. I don't get how it ships. Don't the site owners notice a massive increase in vistor bounce rate?

Recommend justinobeirne.com if you are interested in this kind of stuff.

Seems like the Maps team want us to know that they still exist?

I love the ideas but when did Xs/tweets become so long?

Everyone who you see posting tweets longer 280 characters is paying for the premium subscription, which leads me to believe X might actually be more successful (more sustainable?) than old Twitter in terms of monetization.

The latest update to Google Maps hasn't been too bad but a previous update (I can't remember when exactly - a good few years ago) made it much worse

yeah, an update I think about 2 years ago created zoom levels where some highways appear disconnected because the connections stop rendering too early.

I quite like the new colors. Not the ones for the roads, but the softer greens etc are just much easier on the eyes

I am happy it's not just grumpy man sindrom for me regarding this change.

I do find the new map colors distracting for no reason

I've disabled auto updates on the phone a long time ago.

I occasionally update the webview thing to hopefully not get hacked (doesn't matter much, samsung isn't diligent with the base system anyway).

I noticed that when apps get updated usually it is to move around all the buttons and add ads, so unless they stop working there is hardly reason to update in my opinion.

Is the teal maybe some kind of color blindness friendly feature? Or just 90’s nostalgia

Thank you for the greate product design.

What do you think about MagicEarth?

Less a criticism of the map itself and more of the product, Google Maps overall keeps getting less and less usable.

On iOS it’s possible to tap down into several layers of menus and options to where it becomes impossible to get back out. (For example restaurant -> suggested places -> restaurant -> review) From the lack of well designed navigation it’s clear that the app is a messy collection of UXs thrown on top of each other.

Don’t even get me started on the desktop browser UI where there seem to be competing google place and google map place products.

Or there's the zooming. It's always zooming in or out in a really inconvenient way. The worst is when you search, they zoom you out 10x, just so they can show you more results, but I don't want results from 100's of kms away.

Here's an idea: don't zoom! Us users are grown up enough to zoom for ourselves.

Search: "pizza", filters: 4.5+ star rating.

Result: Zoom out, show 10 places with ratings starting from 1.5, among them a nail shop and a government building. If I'm lucky, it will also show the 4.7 star pizza place 2 blocks away, for which I needed directions.

Funny thing is, sometimes Maps will zoom right in. The classic is when I'm looking for something obscure near my island off the Croatian coast, and it'll zoom right in to a match... in suburban Bratislava. It's almost like it's hoping I won't notice where it's gone.

They keep breaking zoom too.

The "enhancements" are reminding me of when Evernote went from their original UI to a new one, making everything take at least 3-5x more effort/tapping/clicking and I just gave up on it entirely.

The author wants to make google maps pretty and less usable. Minimalist software looks nice, but it is always at the cost of usability and especially discoverability. I don’t actually want to see a map when I open a maps app, I want to know where I can get coffee. The pills are amazing for that.

Make the software you get paid for functional, and try to win awards with side projects nobody but the committee cares about.

Well, star me a flag, and export me a geolayer! Want to go here! Search this area! And by "layers", I mean satellite! Everyone: rush, to the beige! Contrast is too PC! An Apple a day! Let's speak in tones!

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