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What Happened to Google Maps?
What Happened to Google Maps?
Surprising Changes to Google Maps's Cartography Browsing Google Maps over the past year or so, I've often thought that there are fewer labels than there used to be. Google's cartography was revamped three years ago-but surely this didn't include a reduction in labels? Rather, the sparser maps appear to be a recent development.
justinobeirne.com




I think the key thing about this is that most of the complaints make sense, as the author concluded almost as an aside at the end of the article, when you put them in the mobile context. You have to build something that hits the most amount of functionality for the most amount of people, and since more and more people are mobile, and especially since people getting directions and using maps are usually mobile, it makes sense to skew for that use case. And the reality is that all those labels on all those cities are too difficult to manage on mobile and too cluttered. And it's really easy to zoom in when you want more info.
But based on my mobile google maps experience, there tends to usually be just about the right amount of information I need at any given zoom amount, and I don't really have complaints. On the other hand, when I was recently using it on my laptop to plan a vacation to Norway, I did get annoyed at how much I had to zoom in in order to see the level of detail I needed.
You can't always build the perfect product for every single person and also have a site that works seamlessly and doesn't have issues with slowness or bugs, or just user confusion due to inconsistent experiences across platforms, though. We built Imzy to be as flexible and usable as possible, which means that the site is built with a responsive design and works just as well on mobile as it does on desktop, with 100% of the functionality still there. But we've had complaints from people with super giant monitors because there's too much empty white space when they expand their window huge. That's the tradeoff we made. And since the people with those giant monitors are just a tiny fraction of our userbase compared to the number of people on mobile devices, I feel okay with that decision. Obviously at some point I'd like to add a 3-panel view for those people, but on the list of priorities, it's much lower because the level of impact it has and the number of people it impacts is way smaller compared to so many of the other features we want to add.
I appreciate the insight!
There's a real problem with making dense information look good and make sense at the same time. From what I've seen it's never actually been solved or mastered. So many menus these days that are trying to remove the clutter. I can't even count the things on my screen right now that could be considered a menu.... 4? But I'd agree the extra clicks are worth getting the information out of the way