
What Happened to Google Maps? - doff
http://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/what-happened-to-google-maps
======
panic
I'm confused by the replies saying that more dense labels would somehow harm
usability for driving or navigation. When you're driving, you know where
you're going, the map knows where you're going, and it's easy to see the route
you need to take. When you're not on a route, denser labels help you to orient
yourself with the map and to know when to zoom into a particular location.

That said, I also think the focus on paper maps is misplaced. Old-style road
maps had to answer the question, "how do I get there from here?" New-style
digital maps don't need to answer that question any more! Questions new-style
maps need to answer include:

* I know the name of a place or street; where should I zoom in to see more things around that place or street?

* I need to go to a (gas station / rest stop / hospital); where's the closest one?

* How would I get home from where I am?

* I'm in an unfamiliar place and would like to go "downtown" (where there are restaurants and things to do); where is "downtown"?

* Where is my car right now?

Roads help you to orient yourself with the map, but they aren't as
fundamentally important to digital maps as they were to old-style road maps.
The visual space of the map might be better spent helping answer questions
like these.

~~~
Gustomaximus
For driving Google Maps getting quite bad. See this screenshoot:
[http://imgur.com/uPO8QJh](http://imgur.com/uPO8QJh)

This kind of crowded display is fairly common now. I use Here Maps now which
is much better + I like supporting a second option to avoid one service
getting 2 monopolistic.

My theory of why google maps is getting worse is there must be designers
dedicated to this that need to constantly look for 'new' things to add even if
its to the detriment as they can hardly say its all good now and twiddle their
thumbs. Maybe that's unfair but I've seen this effect on other digital
products first hand.

~~~
swiley
The worst part about Google maps while driving is that it won't read
directions until your right up on the turn.

~~~
yardie
Indeed. I'm that idiot driving in circles around the roundabout because Google
Maps gives me the turn right as I'm passing it.

Also, it's forking is completely fucked. If there are 2 right turns coming up
it does not indicate which lane I should be in. In once case I had to drive
60kms, 30 kms there and back, because the interchange had 3 right exits and I
chose wrong.

Now I use Google Maps to find the location and copy the coordinates into Apple
Maps. Or use Waze.

~~~
anonu
I always assumed Waze had the same maps as Google...

------
googleisking
Google Maps, like several other google products (like Groups, even Search),
has seen a constant degrade in user experience since 2005 or so.

Maybe people forgot, but google maps was /blazing fast/ in the beginning.

Nowdays, it brings my browser down to a crawl even before the images are
shown. Maybe people are just stuck with this "google is the best" mentality,
but this has stopped being universally true since many years.

Use OpenStreetMap. It's data is way superior. It's _your_ data. Cannot strett
this enough.

Want a fancy browser? Nokia maps have always been incredibly sleek to use:

    
    
      https://maps.here.com/
    

Heck, even bing maps are /so much faster/. The imagery is also higher quality
in several regions.

Google has still the lead with street view, but for the actual maps I really
encourage you to look for alternatives. They've destroyed their interface as
far I'm concerned.

~~~
nud
OpenSteetMap is very difficult to compare to Google Maps as it uses pre-
rendered raster map images at fixed resolutions, rather than a dynamic vector-
based approach. For me at least, this makes it far slower to load in non-
cached areas, and the lack of precise zooming is super annoying.

~~~
lucb1e
For me Google Maps is slower than OpenStreetMap anywhere in the world, cache
or no cache. Might have something to do with not using Chrome, where Google
makes their websites work the best of course.

What do you mean by "the lack of precise zooming is super annoying"? In my
experience, zooming in Bing Maps and OpenStreetMap are very fast, and only in
Google Maps you're waiting ten seconds for the region to load and browser to
respond before you can zoom further.

~~~
nud
On Google Maps, your zoom factor is any real number within a range. On Open
Street View, you are stuck using one of several predefined zoom levels
(integers 1-20).

To test out, try modifying the "10" in both of the links below:
[https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7058316,-74.2581905,10z](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7058316,-74.2581905,10z)

[https://maps.here.com/?map=40.71455,-74.00714,10,normal&x=ep](https://maps.here.com/?map=40.71455,-74.00714,10,normal&x=ep)

~~~
jamesdelaneyie
Google maps also changes the zoom level to the nearest integer. You can't do
12.5 for example. When I change the 10 on the google maps link in your comment
to 10.5, it rounds it back down to 10 and rewrites the URL. Have ran into the
issue before doing custom maps for sites where 14.5 would be the perfect zoom
level, but can only pick 14 or 15 :(

------
x0054
So I am not crazy after all! The other day I was driving in Palm Springs, and
I was using Google Maps. I literally had to zoom in until the road I was on
almost completely field the screen before it would show me the name of the
road or the roads around it. They did something to their display algorithm
where you now have to zoom almost entirely into an area to see anything about
the area, very inconvenient.

~~~
SiVal
It drives me crazy that I can't find half of the labels I'm looking for, and
when I do, I can't increase the size of the labels enough to make them
readable. Frequently I'll have to fight with the map, zoom in and out and
scroll around to get it to show me the name of a street at all, but when I
finally do coax it into revealing a tiny name far downroad, the font is often
too small to read. If I reflexively expand the map to get a closer look,
everything expands except the label I'm trying to read.

And there's no way to expand it. I do understand that they don't want it to
keep expanding beyond a certain point, especially as they add more details as
they zoom. But they could let it expand within some constraints, such as the
name of a street within the stripe of the street, and cap the size at 3x the
normal size or some such thing.

If the algorithm for letting the labels grow a bit is just too hard for them,
then just give me a little slider on the side to add a fixed, default label
magnification factor. I could expand it a bit to make the labels easier to
read in general, expand it more (but just temporarily) to get a better look at
something, or shrink it a bit in cases where the labels were harder to read
due to overcrowding.

As it is, they've removed too many useful labels without expanding the ones
remaining to make them easier to read and prevented me from expanding them
manually. Bother.

~~~
majewsky
Try to tap-and-hold on the street. It'll put a pin in there and tell you the
address, which contains the road's name.

------
elmerland
I'm surprised the author didn't mention the main difference between paper maps
and google maps. That is, google maps is interactive. With a paper map what
you see is what you get. You had to cram as much information as it would
allow. But this is not the case with google maps. You can zoom in, out, and
anywhere in between. You can't compare the two based on the level of
information displayed at one fixed zoom level because google maps is 3D
whereas traditional paper maps are 2D.

~~~
rcthompson
Not only zooming, Google Maps also has search. If you're looking for Oakland,
CA, you go to the search bar and type "Oakland, CA", and it shows up on the
map. No need to scan the map for the thing you're looking for, that's the
computer's job!

~~~
Bud
Search is of course _entirely_ useless, worse than useless, if you don't know
in advance what you are looking for. Needless to say, search is not an
adequate substitute for intelligent design and proper levels of detail on
maps.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Can you explain your use case here? Normal Google search is great for finding
the name of films you can't remember by typing vague descriptions of the plot.
Maps has similar functionality, like "local coffeeshops" or "<business> in
<city>".

~~~
maxerickson
How do you search for "an interesting area in Woonsocket". Like say you want
to go to a park and then walk past some shops.

~~~
eru
[https://www.google.com/maps/search/an+interesting+area+in+Wo...](https://www.google.com/maps/search/an+interesting+area+in+Woonsocket)

Doesn't seem too bad.

------
mbrock
There's a broad trend of tech companies disrupting traditional industries and
then making rookie mistakes and generally not living up to the standards of
the tradition.

Google, hire cartographers. Amazon, hire librarians and typesetters. Spotify,
hire musicologists.

~~~
powera
Why do you think they haven't?

~~~
mbrock
Well, I assume Google has a big staff of skilled people working on GIS, but
I'm curious to know what kind of input they get from people trained in the art
of cartographical mapmaking...

My hunch is that the tech industry is bad at taking advantage of this kind of
traditional trade knowledge, and the essay in question here is an indicator.

As for Amazon, the Kindle e-books very often have horrific typesetting that
would be laughed out of any traditional book printing shop.

And as for Spotify, their catalogue mechanisms and information design are
clearly awful from a musicology standpoint.

~~~
ehnto
Something that has become interesting to me recently is the amount of
knowledge about maratime weather and sailing that isn't readily accessible in
a some kind of neat database, app or website. You actually have to talk to
people and wander through museums to find out some of it.

It's an example of an industry and body of knowledge that still grows and is
passed around outside of the internet.

Weather patterns for a particular area, places to anchor and dock, safe
passages through reefs. You can't always google the answer and much of it is
gleaned from other sailors who used experience and their tools to figure it
out.

Having grown up pretty much constantly online, with the answer to any question
I have being reasonably available with a quick search; that some common
information about the world can still be discovered and shared is is really
fascinating.

It sometimes feels like there isn't much outside of STEM fields left to
explore.

~~~
antod
_> Something that has become interesting to me recently is the amount of
knowledge about maratime weather and sailing that isn't readily accessible in
a some kind of neat database, app or website. You actually have to talk to
people and wander through museums to find out some of it._

I've been online and windsurfing for decades and I've watched online info
about weather/wave conditions at various locations grow then peak, and now
it's been declining and drying up in recent years.

It used to be curated and published on websites and talked about in public
discussion forums. Even usenet and mailing list archives dating back to the
early 90s would appear in searches. In the last 5 yrs or so it's all been
slowly evaporating into ephemeral Facebook group posts hidden behind a login
form.

I suspect this is happening to all sorts of other communities too as they drop
below critical mass. I'm not thrilled about it.

------
rrockstar
The way I use Google Maps a lot is for discovery. I look at the map of New
York to see cities around it. When I look at a more zoomed in level of the
city I want to see different boroughs and major roads. More zoomed in you want
to discover shops and businesses. The bareness of the current Google Maps
makes it very unsuitable for these functions. For example, even at full zoom
level it only shows a few (<5%) of the shops and bars at the city center where
i live. If i want to get a feel for a city (where are the most restaurants,
where are the shopping centres, etc) the maps are really bad for that unless i
go searching for the specific terms in the search bar. But that is the down
side of the search bar: you never finf something you didn't know you were
looking for.

------
PhantomGremlin
There's much more wrong with Google maps on the desktop than what the article
mentions.

My biggest gripe is contrast, rather the lack thereof. Zooming in and out
doesn't help. There's a lack of contrast at all levels!

And the algorithm for displaying place names sucks. You'll see certain names
at one level, zoom in and they disappear, zoom in some more and they finally
reappear.

Paper maps are unquestionably more ergonomic (but much less convenient) than
Google maps. But it's not just Google. I find other online maps equally bad.
It's quite sad that a paper Rand McNally map is so much better at actually
presenting the geography of an area.

Perhaps other posters here are right, it seems like Google maps is designed
for point-to-point navigation, nothing more.

------
rspeer
Gripe: The font used on this blog is so thin it's almost invisible. I dislike
this trend.

~~~
developer2
The font is so small I had to zoom in 3 times to 150% get a comfortable size.
And then zoomed in one more time to 175% to make the font a little thicker -
as you say, due to the light color. The irony made me giggle a little.

------
altitudinous
Google know more than the author about how Google Maps is used by end users.
The author is grading Google Maps based on the number of cities and roads
displayed, not how the users use it.

Google provide an alternative mapping product, Google Earth, for satisfying
curiosity about the planet. Google maps is primarily a navigation tool. They
have very distinct use cases.

~~~
kylec
I'm sure Google knows more than the author about their own maps, but please
give the author his due: he wrote a successful blog called 41Latitude that did
a lot of in-depth analysis of Google Maps's display of information, and later
led the Apple Maps team. If he has something to say about information density
on maps, I'm inclined to listen.

~~~
hueving
>and later led the Apple Maps team

I'm not sure that puts him in a position to be trusted to criticize google
maps. Apple maps has been considered inferior to google maps since its launch.

Just because he has ideas about how to pack an overwhelming amount of
information onto a map doesn't mean it's a good idea for normal users.

~~~
borski
Apple Maps has actually significantly improved since its launch, and I wish
people would give it its due. I, for one, often prefer Apple Maps to Google
Maps nowadays.

~~~
skrause
My main problem with Apple Maps has always been that it just shows too little
information on the screen, exactly what the author now criticizes about Google
Maps. That doesn't seem to have changes with the current Apple Maps.

~~~
scarylunatic
Funny enough, this guy is responsible for Apple's map design apparently.

"I designed and led the development of Apple’s cartography, and I founded,
recruited, and managed Apple’s multinational Cartography team."

[http://www.justinobeirne.com/projects](http://www.justinobeirne.com/projects)

------
Pyxl101
The new maps look clearer and less cluttered and more useful to me. I would
guess that the maps were simply designed to follow their primary utility
function which is navigation.

Old style printed maps had cities on them, because the map didn't know where
you were going! You had to find your city or your location on the map. Now the
map knows where you're going, so it can show that place extra-clearly while
hiding a lot of detail that's not relevant. Roads are relatively more relevant
than cities, since you travel along them to get from one place to another:
displaying a road shows the user that they have a primary thoroughfare between
locations. You might not care about the name of a city if you're just passing
through; and the city that is your destination will be specifically shown.

My guess is that they display only as many cities as needed to help people
orient themselves while looking at the map, to understand what they're seeing.
More than that is irrelevant to the primary use-case of navigation.

> Google Maps of 2016 has a surplus of roads — but not enough cities. It's
> also out of balance. So what is the ideal? Balance.

The ideal is _utility_ , and the key use-case for Google Maps at that zoom
level is driving navigation. The user's going to input their own destination
into maps anyway, most of the time, and they'll _expect_ it to appear, so it's
no surprise when it does.

Google would have data on this: how many users use Google Maps while driving
regularly, multiple times on a trip (at that zoom level), while _not_ having a
destination entered (and with no destination, obviously no turn-by-turn
directions)? Probably not many. Now imagine overlaying your route with current
position and destination on the maps - it's going to be easier to scan the new
ones. Edit: Navigation is the primary use-case for a map, and I'd guess usage
motivated by that purpose dwarfs the rest by an order of magnitude, and so
it's a good default.

~~~
teddyh
What you write is true for navigating _when driving a car_. For those who try
to use Google Maps for other purposes, the changes are somewhat less useful.

~~~
jasonlfunk
For what purposes is it less useful? If you aren't driving a car, you're
unlikely to be traveling between cities.

~~~
ars
You could be planning a trip - deciding where to stay for example.

I personally have found the new google maps very frustrating and slow - I'm
constantly zooming in and out. This article finally made me realize what I'm
missing, and why I'm having so much trouble with it.

------
tomfaulhaber
Google is a data company and the data available has changed over the last few
years. Maps are both a way to present data and a way to collect data.

The new data that Google has comes from Android handsets and from users using
Google maps and Waze on Android and non-Android handsets.

This data is all about users in motion. At the scale shown in this article,
it's almost exclusively people driving. As a result, it makes a lot more sense
to focus on the connections over the places they connect. This becomes clearer
when you view the roads as more active entities by including congestion and
other real-time data.

This may not be the best presentation for everyone, but it seems to be the
presentation that fits best with Google's current mission and capabilities.

------
jasonkester
The difference between today's Google maps and the authors 1960 paper map is
easy to understand when you stop to think about how those maps are used.

The paper map was used to navigate from place to place. That never happens
with a google map. Sure, you navigate with them, but by telling Google where
you want to go and _letting them draw a line on your map_. You don't need all
that extra information if your phone is navigating you from place to place.
You just need something clean that you can glance at to get a sense of where
you are.

So that's what they've designed their maps to give you.

------
a3_nm
I think that OpenStreetMap has a bit more information that Google Maps at the
same zoom level. To compare on New York:

[https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5263/-73.8556](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5263/-73.8556)

[https://www.google.fr/maps/@40.5487361,-73.9399427,9z](https://www.google.fr/maps/@40.5487361,-73.9399427,9z)

(Edit: as the child comments correctly point out, this is only the default OSM
rendering style.)

~~~
maxerickson
Keep in mind that the tiles shown by default on the OpenStreetMap website are
just an example rendering. Anyone can take the OpenStreetMap data and use it
to render a map with different cartographic choices.

There's even several other example renderings that can be easily accessed on
the website, for example

[https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5253/-74.2003&layers...](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5253/-74.2003&layers=C)

------
agumonkey
The Google part happened in Maps. It was a mapping product, and now it's a
geographical fronted to search. The v2 was all about services on a cute (and
sluggish) rendering substrate. It's now usable these days, still way slower
than OSM or bing. I miss the old presentation but alas ...

ps: I recently discovered the 'my timelime' feature. Surprising to say the
least.

------
notatoad
This criticism reminds me a bit of when people criticize Google search results
for a query like "insurance" or "shoes" having too many ads. Searching for
vague terms is useless, so they just display ads instead.

At the zoom level the screenshots are taken at, maps are essentially useless.
The most important information they can convey is "there's lots of roads here"
or "this region is densely populated". The maps aren't optimized for accuracy,
they're displaying a summary. The long island example really struck me - the
old map displayed the primary route only, the new map conveys the fact that
there are multiple options. If you're stuck in traffic and you pull up the
map, you can see there's another decent route and ask the app to provide you
with directions on an alternate route. If you're using the old maps, you'd
just see the single primary route highlightedand assume you should stick with
the route you're on.

------
DanHulton
Is it just me, or is that site _unreadable_? Chrome 50, Windows 10, and the
font is about the thinnest I've ever seen.

~~~
cr3ative
Chrome/Win 10 and I had serious trouble making the site readable; zooming to
175% just about worked.

Default rendering:
[http://i.imgur.com/uhbRcsR.png](http://i.imgur.com/uhbRcsR.png)

------
adwf
It's the speed/lag that really annoys me nowadays. If I pan across the map or
zoom in, I know I'm waiting a good 5-6 seconds before the new tiles will be
loaded. And that's on desktop, not mobile. It's so irritating I've just about
abandoned google.

------
ulkesh
"What Happened to Google Maps?" or "How to say 'more roads and less labels' in
20 different ways".

------
SeanDav
Google really won't care about any comments here, they are all about the data.
So simply stop using Google maps. Tell your family to stop using Google maps.
Tell all your friends to stop using Google maps. Blog about not using Google
Maps.

Find alternatives, there are several mentioned in these comments for starters.

When/if Google start seeing a reduction in their map use, only then will they
start paying attention.

------
iamflimflam1
I suspect that these changes are dues to the switch from bitmap tiles to
vectors.

~~~
lucb1e
Right, giving away too many labels at once would make it too easy for people
to copy the map data. By requiring much higher zoom levels, people would have
to do many more requests to grab everything.

Not applicable at the zoom scale used in the article, but on higher zoom
levels this is certainly a factor.

------
flyinghamster
I've noticed the disappearing detail from Google Maps as well, and I find it
really annoying - especially when perusing a rural area and having to zoom in
to ridiculous levels to see town names.

Another thing I'd like to see is making the "avoid tolls" setting easier to
get to. Northern Illinois is toll road central, and I-355 in particular is a
huge ripoff when you pay cash. Since I don't need any of the tollways for
commuting, I can't justify getting an I-Pass.

~~~
brokenmachine
Yes! I hate that!!

It doesn't even remember the setting, you have to hit the three dots for menu
before you search, choose "Route Options", then tick "Avoid tolls", then hit
OK. EVERY TIME.

And if you forget to go through this and start navigation, there's no way to
change it, you have to hit back, then do the above. Why not have a way to
change route options from the navigation screen??

------
tuukkah
With open-source tools and services for OSM data from Mapzen and Mapbox, you
can make your own map styles: light or heavy in detail, highlighting cities,
highways or footpaths.

------
cwmma
I suspect part of the idea is that you will use the search to find cities
instead of finding them visually based on their names on the map. The issue
with large cities that are near other large cities being omitted from maps is
'The Baltimore Phenomenon'

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartographic_generalization#Th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartographic_generalization#The_Baltimore_Phenomenon)

------
lucb1e
I've been noticing this but could never quite put my finger on what it was.
This is exactly it.

On google maps I can never find what I want. I thought it was because I've
been using OpenStreetMap, and had gotten used to a different display style.
Seeing a place once in OSM anywhere in the world, and zooming out from it to
continent view, I can almost always find it again later. On Google Maps I
always got lost. Now I finally get what the problem is.

------
jalami
I noticed the same thing a few months ago. I live in a larger city, largest in
our county, but we don't exist on the map unless you really zoom. A small town
right next-door that's a lot more affluent shows up even when zoomed out to
the tristate region. My guess was Google is stepping up their advertisement
business for cities.

That or people just find whitespace aesthetically pleasing and Google
designers went kind of crazy with it.

------
ekr
I've only ever been using Google Maps for the sattelite imagery, street view,
and routin. For those things, Google Maps is still great. OpenStreetMap is
what I use for orienting, find cycling paths, trails etc.

So I'm not too bothered by this change. What I don't understand is why hasn't
anybody taken the Google Maps routing and use it in OSM apps? Might not be
legal, but similar non-commercial projects it should be fine.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
There's a lot of effort right now going into making OSM itself better for car
navigation. (Take a look at the OSRM changelog: pretty much every feature in
the last 6 months seems to be targeted to this use case.) And I'd say OSM is
already better than Google for cycling and walking routing.

------
jrbapna
While the analysis is fine, the conclusion is almost certainly false. At
Google's scale, nearly any iteration made on core products is backed by an
immense understanding of their end users and a near unlimited supply of user
data.

~~~
lucb1e
There can be a million things wrong with user testing, and while I am certain
they know more about it than me, I think it's a safe bet to say they're not
perfect either and may make mistakes in such a complex topic.

(Small example of what I mean: many people like the new style because it's
prettier, but when I use OSM I get to places a lot faster than people using
Google Maps, so they might be asking the wrong question even if they did user
testing with a million people. But that's just one example of everything that
could go wrong.)

~~~
jrbapna
Sure, it's possible, however unlikely, that a mistake of this sort fell
through the cracks, but I wouldn't place any bets on it

------
ableal
The "Google, where did I leave my keys?" joke is getting closer to feature
status, and that's probably what's going on with Google Maps.

Anecdatum: last month I was driving out for a weekend in some rural bungalows
a few miles outside a small city (Elvas, Portugal). The address was a bit
vague, the place name too common, so much so that I had GPS coords stowed away
in a message pic (don't ask ;-).

So, when I pop out Google Maps in the old faithful iPad2 (which happens to be
the 3G version, and therefore GPS chipped, good for navigation), and zoom in
the area ... amidst thin local roads and lots of blank space, there's the
place name _and the days we 're staying there_.

Turns out the Gmail app in that iPad was also used to send or review the
emails with the reservations.

Even in my 'desktop' I've been noticing Google Maps marking out city places
which seem small compared to other landmarks, but where I often go or mention
in emails.

(Thanks, I do know where I left my keys today, I'm good.)

~~~
JetSpiegel
Never thought I'd see Elvas mentioned on HN, now I've seen everything.

------
donretag
"The primary route across Long Island — Interstate 495"

Off-topic, but as a native NYCer, we would never call it that. It's the LIE. I
once had a woman ask me in the parking lot of a Walgreens how to get on the
278. I was puzzled for a second, then I realized she was talking about the
BQE. Living out in California now, I miss the days of calling highways by
name.

------
AJRF
I think what Google is doing makes sense given smartphone adoption and the
fact the maps are use for fundamentally different functions now.

You don't need a hulking great map with loads of detail at a high level to get
from point A to point B, you now just use your smartphone for that.

I assume Google spotted a trend of people searching place names as opposed to
picking points between two separate locations.

So how does that change the function of the map?

Well, we no longer need to have the zoomed out overload of detail, if we need
more information about a place we are visiting, we type in the city name, or
address, then zoom in close to see the detail we need.

The article kind of skimps over the point that we can interact with those maps
now.

~~~
Tempest1981
Why can't the map serve multiple functions? I guess I wasn't overloaded by the
detail.

~~~
AJRF
I would guess that placing labels on a map has _some_ cost. Not doing
this(especially over 3G, 4G, EDGE) might have some gain in loading time.

If you need that fine-grain detail zoom in?

Not saying I advocate this approach, but thought I would try give you an
answer :)

------
lemiffe
"Less is just less. And that's certainly the case here."

Not sure I agree, in my opinion most of us use search & destinations nowadays,
even in offline mode. The only reason I look at a map is to gauge distance
between me and my destination.

~~~
kuschku
Almost no one I know uses directions – all look at the map, see "3
intersections north, then right, then the 2nd on the left" and drive/bike/walk
like that.

I certainly do

And for this use case Google maps is getting pretty useless

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Oh we all know that person that just follows the printed directions blindly.
They get off the route, they're helpless. And they can't get there a 2nd time
without the directions again, because they never paid attention to _where they
were actually going_.

------
jccalhoun
I've had the frustrating experience of looking on google maps and seeing a
town I was looking for not be labeled at a zoom level where I could see where
it was in relationship to other towns. But I wonder if part of this is about
google trying to funnel users into using maps in a particular way. Is this
their attempt to get users to search more and scrutinize maps less? Are they
trying to make online interactive maps a different experience than paper maps?

------
scbd
It's way too slow and its missing some stuff buts it's moving in the right
direction. Task based (someone mentioned this) is correct. Tasks are easy
targets for Google's user-centered design and machine learning. It's not as
simple as reproducing a road map from the 1950's, adding pan and zoom and
calling it a day. You design for the device (hint: mobile) and the tasks that
are used MOST. Do you really think Google doesn't keep track? People don't use
Google Maps the same way as a 20in folded road map or a school atlas. If you
wonder what tasks are they are designing for just look at the UI of the App.
It's dominated by a big SEARCH bar and a big "get DIRECTIONS" button. That's
what people do and that's what it's designed for. They are trying to make it
glanceable in a car and make room to see search results or to add stuff based
on interaction (like traffic, alternative routes, etc.) and not waste time and
bandwidth on loading all the extra crap.

------
sz4kerto
Look at Here maps. It is a much better designed map, from a cartography
perspective.

~~~
sccxy
I would also recommend Here Maps.

Offline usage is best for travelling.

------
darkhorn
Satellite imagery for close zoom levels aren't loaded for Turkey!
[https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/maps/Ixm4C6...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/maps/Ixm4C6hviZQ;context-
place=topicsearchin/maps/category$3Afirefox)

~~~
kuschku
And in Germany they haven’t been updated since 2004.

 _Google’s products are shit outside of the US, more at 11_

It’s nothing new, it’s been like this for quite a while.

------
a3n
The difference between the album-cover paper map and Google Maps is that every
"pixel" on the paper map was put there by conscious, functional and esthetic
choice. In fact the people who designed and drew that map probably bragged
about it to their peers.

No designing human ever sees a rendered Google Map, except for testing. The
overall esthetic programmed into the algorithms are designed, but no human
looks at the final result and says "it would just look better if this was
shifted up and to the right a bit." There are an infinite number of possible
renderings on a digital map, but a specific published paper map goes out the
door with a sigh of satisfaction.

Which is to say, there's a long way to go before a digitial map is beautiful,
and a specific rendering is as good as possible for the person viewing it for
a specific purpose.

The only way digital maps win (and they do) is that you can ask them things,
and they cover the world.

------
ddimitrov
From my experience, using the Google maps within the city, it tends to ne
pretty sparse with labels by default.

This is a good thing because in a place like tokyo there is just too much
stuff - if I care for aometgubd I either search for it, or drop a pub and
check what is around.

On the other hand, Maps always shows the labels of things I have searched for
in the past, yielding a customized legend of landmarks+things that matter to
me.

------
ZeroGravitas
The conclusion seems to undermine the whole piece. If the changes were made to
help mobile uses then great, I almost always use it on mobile, and apparently
so do the majority of users.

He poses the question of which map you'd want when lost. A mobile phone with
Google Maps is clearly the right answer.

------
hueving
The comparison to a paper map is stupid. A paper map is severely limited in
that you can't zoom in on it so it has to be packed with enough information to
hopefully be useful. An interactive map only needs to give you enough context
to know what to zoom in on. If I'm using a touch interface that overloads me
with information in one screen, it's a bad interface.

It's like claiming that the new york times should display the entire full
front page of the newspaper on a mobile device so you can read several
articles without scrolling or loading more content because that's what you
used to be able to do with the real paper.

~~~
Bud
Not stupid at all, actually. The paper map is hand-tuned and shows a great
deal of thought and care about precisely what to show, how to show it, and
where to show it.

There are many lessons that digital maps can learn from hand-crafted maps.

------
nicoboo
The article has its points and it is always interesting to analyze those
specific readibility and rendering analysis. It helps to understand the choice
made by interactive map platforms through static image and dynamic controls.

Justin O'Beirne knows what he is talking about. He has worked for Apple Maps
and he also created other interesting and really precise analysis in the past.

[http://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/google-maps-and-label-
rea...](http://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/google-maps-and-label-readability)

------
powera
It's probably already been said, but comparing Google Maps to a paper map is
stupid.

The paper map _has_ to have lots of cities on it, because there's no other way
to find where exactly the specific suburb is if it's not on the map. In Google
Maps, you can zoom in, you can search, you can have a link for direction sent
to you, ...

The author may claim "less is just less", but apart from "printing a map
before knowing where I'm going", I can't think of a situation where the
"improved" map would be at all useful.

------
wtbob
Great article, but man it reads oddly with JavaScript turned off. Huge masses
of text repeated, scrolling weirdly broken. It's almost a proof of its own
point …

------
sztanko
Optimal placement of labels is an NP-hard problem[1]. Since google maps
transferred to vector and label placement is now done on the (mobile) client,
I am not surprised by what happened. [1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_label_placement](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_label_placement)

~~~
maxerickson
It would be cheap to transmit pre-calculated hints for various display
situations.

------
praestigiare
When using a map for navigation at a glance, with a route overlaid on the map,
I do not need to know the names of the streets, but I do need to see that
there are three cross streets before my turn.

------
sabujp
Comparing google maps to here maps at the same zoom level (on desktop, not on
mobile) here maps has more info. It's like google maps has completely given up
on the desktop.

------
xgbi
What if they simply don't want people to _print_ the map and rather use google
maps to actually perform the guidance?

------
Terretta
Last dozen images in the article are mis-distributed. They don't go with the
local text.

------
london888
Anyone done a comparison with Apple Maps?

~~~
macintux
Out of curiosity, I took the final comparison and re-created it (roughly) in
desktop Apple Maps.

[http://imgur.com/5CvnHn8](http://imgur.com/5CvnHn8)

------
drumttocs8
Really, just zoom in if you're unhappy with the decluttering setting...

------
london888
Most use cases the user will have their location and destination marked with
route - so they don't need all the detail at that zoom level.

