Month: February 2005

Discussion of GoogleMaps has been lively on my User Interface design lists. Overall ratings for Google Maps are good, but I have problems with the way they locate places based on search.

GoogleMaps
http://maps.google.com/
Posters say they like that you can drag the map and that the directions appear to be more accurate than MapQuest or Yahoo! Maps. To find places on the map, you can use their search boxes on the right or enter a search in the bar above. It wasn’t apparent at first exactly how to find groups of things like hotels or grocery stores, which is organized as a layer on Yahoo (click a box marked restaurants). I had to take the Tour to figure that the search bar is the way to do this. Using the search bar you can plot places like restaurants, hotels, etc. based on info on web pages they have stored, which is sort of wild but not always accurate or complete. I prefer Yahoo!’s ability to plot items that are categorized as what they are vs having the word in its name, e.g., if you search for “Farm” you get a lot of State Farm agents.

But one thing Google does well is to tie a particular location to its “more like this” search function. If you click a search result, it will point you to the website of the entity in question or a list of websites of nearby related entities. This is less seeing it on a map than finding what may be nearby. Unfortunately, if you try to use the back button to return to the map search results, you get the default GoogleMaps view.

As for the interface, I had a tendency to reset the map back to the entire US view by accident, while using the zoom function. The Zoom and Reset buttons are a bit close and not otherwise labeled. Reset button looks a lot like “Recenter” to me. Also, if you pan off of the US and try to zoom in, you get a lot of blank images with red Xs. And don’t try to find South America, Europe or Russia. The oceans go on forever….

Here are a some similar maps in other parts of the world:

Search.ch Map (Switzerland)
http://map.search.ch/
A blogger recently suggested that Google copied the interface from this site. It uses an aerial photo layer that is fun to zoom into, but probably not entirely necessary for the purpose of the site.

Map My India
http://mapmyindia.com/

from a post on sigia-l: