It's obviously an intentional choice to avoid too much screen clutter...
but I agree it's infuriating. I've spoken in the past with some people who work on Maps products and have heard "people say they want it but then they really don't..." and I honestly can't imagine what UX studies are telling them that.
All the time I see a destination and I'm trying to figure out what closest cross street I should stop at and by the time I've zoomed and panned enough to find whatever random faraway place manages to have a label (feels like an unwanted game of whack-a-mole, where will the label pop up??), I can't tell if I've zoomed over to a parallel street instead.
And the solution is so simple too: whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label! I mean if I zoom in so far that only the one street is visible and there's no other text on it, but Maps still leaves it blank... it just feels inexcusable.
I’ve worked on mapping software, and in fact on street name placement
(Not Google or Apple). The code we had for deciding where and when to draw street names has to be among the most complicated, full-of-edge-cases code I have ever encountered. Engineering is pulling one direction, data providers are pulling another direction. UX is pulling this direction, cartography is pulling that direction. Everybody in the company wants to bike-shed about it and insert their opinions because the problem to them “seems so easy.”
I’m not going to go into too many specifics but for most map products I’ve worked on, the usual reason that a label doesn’t appear somewhere is because the map data provider hard-codes the potential places where a label could be displayed, and it’s not “everywhere along the road”. You might be zooming into a place where a cartographer chose not to add a label point. Good map software will try to sensibly fill in these gaps but are not perfect. Too aggressive about adding labels and you have the artists and cartographers telling you some areas on the map are too cluttered. Not aggressive enough, and some areas on the map are bare.
It’s maddening getting those bugs saying “I think there are too many labels”, backing it off, then a few days later getting the bugs, “I can’t find the street label next to my house!” Lots of simple-to-whiteboard solutions would work well for your particular neighborhood but look terrible in Manhattan or rural Idaho, not to mention Japan. It’s really not simple.
I think the thing that confuses me and parent is that Maps ALREADY knows about road continuity. And road names.
I'm sure I'm missing something, but (1) flow labels along their roads to the center of the screen, (2) separate them with predefined padding, (3) drop labels if visible label count > maximum, smallest-to-largest road, until under the threshold.
If UXers want to bitch, hide it behind a layer filter. But honestly, #&@+ them. (Sorry, but we are talking about maps that don't show road names here)
> but we are talking about maps that don't show road names here
That presumes that road names are an intrinsic part of a map. While they certainly were in the past, I think there's a paradigm shift happening that's become so common we don't notice it anymore. We don't tell people to meet us at "The intersection of Street X and Y" as much anymore, we tell them to meet us near a prominent landmark like a park, train station, or restaurant. We barely even need street names for navigation anymore; instead, our software tells us how many blocks to walk and when to turn (even automobile GPS tells us to expect turns in the next X miles). I feel this will be part of a larger revolution where we might start using alternative easy-to-shate GPS coordinates [0], and even completely new map styles like isochrone maps. [1]
> We don't tell people to meet us at "The intersection of Street X and Y" as much anymore, we tell them to meet us near a prominent landmark like a park, train station, or restaurant.
Citation needed. As a New Yorker, intersections of streets are how we do it all the time, when you want to meet on the street to walk somewhere together. "Meet me on 23rd and 8th."
> We barely even need street names for navigation anymore; instead, our software tells us how many blocks to walk and when to turn (even automobile GPS tells us to expect turns in the next X miles).
When streets are closely spaced, the name is absolutely necessary to know which one to turn onto -- you can pass a whole street in the time it takes the GPS to start and stop speaking and have no idea which street the "next street" refers to.
And plenty of people still walk or bike, where they check their phone only occasionally and memorize the name of the next street they need to stop at or turn on.
Sure there are new use cases, but the old ones aren't going away at all.
I hear what you're saying, but at least in the US we only have 2 pieces of well labelled and persistent navigational data in the real world: street names and numeric addresses.
In my experience, navigation with Google Maps can be terrible about interchange / exit lanes. It's much easier just to pick the road name and follow the well-labelled and up-to-date highway signs.
> we tell them to meet us near a prominent landmark
So that's the navigational use case for 'meet person'
Another common use case is 'proceed to building at 123 Long Street'. I've met several confused tourists and couriers whose satnav has dumped them at, say, 973 Long Street with an arrival fanfare.
Anything moving on a screen will call attention to itself. A bunch of road labels "flowing" around at once turns into a huge mess.
The real problem here is with label conflicts. Say you have an important point of interest in the center of the screen already. If a road label happens to be placed underneath the point of interest label, it will look like the road is unlabeled.
There are clever ways of moving labels around, but: 1. it has to run in realtime on the client, and 2. it has to look good in motion and in all possible situations you can think of (since you have no control over what the data will end up being). This is why older raster maps often have better labeling than newer vector maps -- you can do a lot of precomputation on the server to make sure the labels look nice.
Yes, you got it. Not only does it have to both look good motionless and in motion, but it has to look good at different speeds, and at smoothly changing zoom levels. Back in the olden days, there was no smooth zoom and pan, so you'd pre-compute labels at each discrete (logarithmic scale) zoom level and they'd remain fixed while panning around. And since panning happened in discrete steps, you wouldn't really notice labels repositioning themselves for each scene.
Now, we have moving maps that scroll at whatever speed you're driving or moving, and arbitrary, smooth zooming, so you can't just let an algorithm take hold or you get labels popping in and out as the logic decides in real time where to put them. Users will find it distracting and weird, and most designers will say "no way". So you need to add things like debounce and hysteresis. You have to have resolve label conflicts in a way that doesn't always let (for example) POI names always take precedence. You have to determine whether/when to display street numbers vs street names. Do the locals call it I-880 or "Nimitz Freeway"? You have to keep labels right side up at arbitrary map rotations and along twisty road geometry (easy but yet more code). It adds up and requires these fiddly thresholds and scaling factors that are usually hidden from the user.
As someone else pointed out, having sliders and preferences for every little tuning knob is always a no-go with the designers, who want everything to just magically work without configuration. As a programmer, I've always thought that "design minimalism" is cancer, but on the other hand, it provides constraints and makes the problem interesting to solve.
This still doesn't explain why when you zoom in enough so there are no conflicts and items are sparse, every road can't be labeled somewhere along its length.
The purpose of flow layouts is to resolve exactly this problem at map movement time (e.g. user zoom or pan).
Google Maps already does some flowing, it's just not very good at it once you zoom all the way in.
If you have an important point of interest center-screen, then the lower priority labels flow away, or are priority pruned if overly numerous. This allows users to resolve invisible labels simply by zooming in.
I'm absolutely in agreement on the performance challenges, which are likely the real reason precomputed labels seem to be used on Google Maps.
>we are talking about maps that don't show road names here
Can you provide a use case where that would be necessary for a situation where you're not using the navigation? A lot of people seem to think this is a requirement for a map but when are you ever using a map to find a specific street where navigation wouldn't be far easier?
Any time you're looking at a locally saved/cached copy of the map but don't have the network connection to make navigation requests? Or are just trying to find your own (or your friends) position in a situation where you have spotty or unavailable GPS.
Do Google or Apple let you use navigation offline? I know it can continue an existing route if the connection drops, but I've never tried to start navigation somewhere while offline.
Thanks for explaining that - I tend to assume there are smart people are working on these things, and when thinking "Can't they just... it would be so easy to..", I assume it's because the problem is a lot harder than I think it is, not because they're missing the obvious solution right in front of them.
For my own personal more mundane stuff, it's usually "can't you just parse the names and addresses and put them in separate fields?" and the answer is usually, "80% of the time, yes. If you're ok with that, we're good". They never are ok with that :-)
This really really sounds like an argument for adding a “name density” slider somewhere in the corners of the main UI. Just admit that no one setting works for all people in all places and stop even trying to find it.
That violates the "it just works" directive that designers and developers are working under. If it has to be configurable they view it as a design problem so instead they force you to use it the way they want it to look.
I'd say that, unfortunately, this is a case of designers trying to capital-D "Design" rather than truly understanding & solving user / customer problems. Given the wide variety of use cases and user needs (which are also context-dependent for the same user), "it just works" may lead to it not working in a plurality of instances. (/currently leading a design and Pmgmt team)
There is configuration though. Pretty much any map app has a place you can switch between map/satellite/other views. And toggle overlays for traffic and other things. Stick a slider in there if you must hide your shame at not being able to make your tool all things to all people, this is where you’ve already admitted that people have different needs.
A professional meteorological mapping and modelling tool we use at work has exactly this: A simple "declutter" slider.
And it is easily one of its most impressive features - so incredibly simple (esp. compared to all the other bells and whistles it offers) and yet constantly proving its usefulness in everyday use.
Gmaps & Co. have become even more tiresome to use since I actually have experienced how much more comfortable it could be.
I don't doubt your experiences or the reasons for constant regression in smartphone map usability over the last decade. Thanks for providing first hand experience. I hope I did not suggest that I think this is an easy problem to solve.
I do think this missing feature betrays a deep organizational dysfunction as you have described. This dysfunction leads to losing sight of what is valuable to users.
>Whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label! I mean if I zoom in so far that only the one street is visible and there's no other text on it, but Maps still leaves it blank... it just feels inexcusable.
Agreed. Happens on google maps too, and that's just so irritating
Then I started filling out streets with the continuous name of the street (first copy and pasting the name in small squares, then by hand adding red dots to separate them). This is how it looked after:
I was pretty careless/moved quickly, but that should match some of the effect of imperfect algorithmic mapping decisions. The key insight is that even if one specific crook looks horid (not enough space to lay it out neatly), humans will just look at another part of the street to determine the name. But if it's really a little nook where the crooked letters don't contain enough information we'll pinch/zoom in to make it big enough to display legibly. If you really look closely at my picture you will see places where I totally garbled street names through careless copy and pasting and overlap. No problem at all.
This is because their name didn't appear even a single time in my view. that means even though I'm on desktop and there's plenty of space, I would have to zoom or scroll to see them! They're literally information that is missing from the map.
For other streets I had to look a fair way away to copy and paste, since the street name wasn't anywhere near where I was working. (For example, looking at my first, original map, suppose you're at the top-left point, on Jersey street: how long do you go down Jersey street to the right, before you hit the Jersey and Church street intersection? This is a super common question!)
I think the resulting map is extremely repetitive, but pretty useful/beautiful. Humans can filter out repetitive information really easily. It's just no problem for us at all. Tasks such as the one I mentioned, where you are about to go down Jersey street and need to know when you'll hit Church street, are some of the main types of navigation tasks we do every day.
So I don't see the issue with making the repetitive map. Instead of roads, it should just repeat the name of the road.
(On the other hand, those of you who disagree can at least see what the Google engineer was talking about.)
I can't tell whether you're getting serious, but I'm pretty sure most users would not prefer your change. It's so dense it's hard to read, and in a repetitive way.
I would 100% prefer the change. That's how most of the paper maps I used at the time used to be, and it was wonderful, because they were more useful tools.
IMHO it could be useful if the repetition was greyed out. It would allow you to either read it directly (if your eyesight allows), or quickly trace the line to the text in black and read the name while being able to easily see what direction the street goes
Humans are fantastic at ignoring noise and concentrating on whatever we want to focus on. While you're reading this very comment do you have any idea how much noise is in your field of vision that you're ignoring? Not just on this screen at the same time (literally megabytes of other bitmaps besides my words) but the rest of your field of vision. Really look around. This message contains 575 bytes of text embedded in gigabytes of moving video you're ignoring. (Just one example.)
But if the information isn't there, no amount being human can bring it out. You're stuck.
For me, it's not hard to read. I'd prefer it, anyway.
Still, if you wouldn't prefer it then we can see what the Google engineer meant, as this is exactly what you get if you show as much information as possible!
There are so many other ways to present what you are presenting that writing the idea off seems silly. With some tweaking I think that idea could work -- if the text were in a faint gray, for example, so that it wasn't so contrasting. Probably want to do away with the bright red dots, too. Subtlety...
Readers here seriously misinterpreted what I was doing.
I absolutely 100% didn't write off the idea of putting more labels. I wasn't making a point about how bad it would be. I was doing something different.
>It's obviously an intentional choice to avoid too much screen clutter...
>but I agree it's infuriating. I've spoken in the past with some people who work on Maps products and have heard "people say they want it but then they really don't..." and I honestly can't imagine what UX studies are telling them that.
>All the time I see a destination and I'm trying to figure out what closest cross street I should stop at and by the time I've zoomed and panned enough to find whatever random faraway place manages to have a label (feels like an unwanted game of whack-a-mole, where will the label pop up??), I can't tell if I've zoomed over to a parallel street instead.
>And the solution is so simple too: whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label! I mean if I zoom in so far that only the one street is visible and there's no other text on it, but Maps still leaves it blank... it just feels inexcusable.
So let's break it down. First of all this person says that the REASON for this is to "AVOID CLUTTER". They then "I honestly can't imagine what UX studies are telling them that." So I did one! You're looking at a UX study that might tell them that.
We actually have a null hypothesis:
>I've spoken in the past with some people who work on Maps products and have heard "people say they want it but then they really don't..."
We have something to test. What we have to test is whether it's true that people REALLY DON'T want that.
We have a problem that we're UX testing. The problem is "I see a destination and I'm trying to figure out what closest cross street I should stop at and by the time I've zoomed and panned enough to find whatever random faraway place manages to have a label (feels like an unwanted game of whack-a-mole, where will the label pop up??), I can't tell if I've zoomed over to a parallel street instead." This is a clear problem that we can easily and specifically test.
And here is EXACTLY what we are testing:
>"And the solution is so simple too: whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label!"
That says that the solution is SO SIMPLE. We are looking at the simplest possible solution. One that requires (ALMOST) NO ALGORITHMIC CHOICE ABOUT WHEN AND WHERE TO DISPLAY A STREET NAME!! This is given very simply and super-specifically: "WHENEVER THERE IS ROOM TO PUT A LABEL THEN PUT THE LABEL". This is what we're testing.
It wasn't my idea to keep it in black (instead of grey). It's there in black and white: "THE SOLUTION IS SO SIMPLE." And then it's a FULLY SPECIFIED SOLUTION.
So we have this:
* I can't imagine what UX study could POSSIBLY have had the result that people don't REALLY want it!
* All you need to do is this: WHENEVER there is room to put a label, put a label!
It doesn't say "On at least one point point on the road". It doesn't say somewhere. It says whenever. We're testing this.
The results of MY test is that for ME, I don't see that I don't REALLY want even this version of the UX. I think it's 100% readable and not too cluttered for me. I would turn on this form of navigation. It's extremely easy for me to read. It's an improvement. (Over these examples given just now by someone else: https://imgur.com/a/hCo3V2X )
So the WORST POSSIBLE way to test this UX still doesn't show us the result that I wanted, that people "DON'T REALLY WANT IT". However, it does show a bad way to test this UX change. So if you couldn't imagine a UX study that had this result before, well, now you can imagine it.
The option of putting the street name in very light grey and to make the red dots less intrusive is pretty "obvious". But it's not necessary for testing what I quoted.
I didn't test something DIFFERENT from what was quoted. I tested the worst possible clutter effect of interpreting the words "WHENEVER THERE IS ROOM TO PUT A LABEL, THEN PUT THE LABEL."
I didn't find the effect that was claimed. It seems fine to me, and seems like a UX improvement. Anyway, even if you all viscerally react very negatively to the mockup, at least now you can "imagine what UX study" might have told people that.
Thanks. It wasn't my idea. I literally tested the spec "whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label!"
I guess the person meant "on one spot" but since labels are frequently repeated I didn't see the harm of trying it out in the "worst" way possible. Still looks fantastic.
Maybe it was misspecified but I did what it says and I think it's great. A light grey might help but then again it could be easier to ignore black you don't need than make out light grey you do.
I looked at the mockup and imagined it on my screen as I navigated, imagining this from a few different points, and imagining further pinching to zoom and scrolling around. I thought it was great. Especially if I imagined zooming in further to deal with an exact corner I was going to.
I didn't get the result I expected, that it would look awful. It looks great, fantastic, tremendous, amazing, wonderful, superb, terrific, awesome, excellent, magnificent. I literally have to open a thesaurus to express how great it is, I ran out of words partway through.
How it doesn't look is "something I really don't want", which is what I was promised.
I'm confused, are you only talking about apple maps? I just checked on Google maps and I can easily see all the street names on my screen, as long as I zoom in far enough that there is enough space.
I wanted to see how it would look if "whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label!"
I think my render looks absolutely fine. I don't see why I wouldn't always use it if I had a toggle switch. Yes it's cluttered if you just glance at it, but we don't use maps as pieces of minimalist art.
I think you're misunderstanding the OP's complaint. It's not that streets aren't repeatedly labelled. In fact your before had multiple labels. It's that sometimes google maps chooses not to label things at all until you zoom in more. Or sometimes out, strangely.
> You struggle to locate the names of the streets--in their absence, Google Maps shoves a bunch of unsolicited retail venues in your face.
Remember, Google's an ad company; think of it from their perspective.
Google wants to push users towards businesses that advertise with them, so that business continue giving Google money and data.
Users are used to working around crap software, so they're unlikely to stop using Google Maps enough to harm Google's business.
So why would Google do anything to improve Google Maps for users if it even slightly harms their core advertising business? Their goal isn't to make the best map; it's to make money (by running a map service).
Do you think those example would be too cluttered if the street names continously repeated their own name the way I showed: https://imgur.com/a/xQiF6pm
(Perhaps in light grey, perhaps spaced slightly more apart.)
Funny thing is, as far as I can tell, logicallee is not misunderstanding OP's complaint, he is subscribing to it and substantiating it.
Some people, among them apparently map makers, argue that "users don't want too many labels". logicallee is arguing that it's virtually impossible to put too many labels (by putting in as many labels as possible and showing that it's perfectly legible, and totally fine functionally, even if it's not the most aesthetic experience).
FWIW, I subscribe to OP, that it's infuriating not to have streets labeled, and find logicallee's point rather convincing, that having more labels doesn't really distract from the functionality of the map (and I don't care that it affects the map's "beauty").
I dislike it because it slows my consumption of the map; annoying while walking, possibly dangerous while driving. We're all accustomed to reading lines of text in their entirety, which results in endless repetition here. Training the eye to look only between one set of red dots may be possible, but I doubt it would ever be as effortless as reading a discrete word with whitespace around it. I do agree every road should be labeled when there's space - perhaps even at regular intervals when there's space, but making the labeling continuous is counterproductive.
Apart from being easy to consume, the map tiles must also be in sync with the company's brand and design ethos. Its hard to imagine Apple's minimalist aesthetic delivering these tiles.
What I think would be ideal is that for a visible stretch of road in the middle of it there should be the street name. Sometimes it's there and sometimes it not and I haven't found any logical reason why it appears and goes (in my to be fair limited use).
And if Kopec in the lower center were the name of a street, I think it's great that it's written there.
The only thing missing is the red dots, so instead of roadroadroadroad it said road·road·road·road (by the way you might wonder why I made the dots red in my example: it's so the eye can just focus on the red dots to sparsely get the road's path.)
I just don't see the issue at all. It's way better, at that zoom level, to have to use my human ability to notice and ignore patterns and ignore noise while concentrating on what I want, than to use two fingers to try to zoom in enough for the map to place the names. I just don't see the issue with the view you presented. It looks great!
you choose the easiest case, large city blocks in a grid. Try a European or Asian city with lots of twisty roads and alleys and it gets much harder. The maps here are already covered with the names of buildings, stations, parks, hospitals etc...
I often want road names in Tokyo but they are also competing for space of transit lines as well as places with double or triple decker differently named things like there's a freeway named A over aroad named B which is over a Subway line named C
Road names are usually not as important in Japan as they are not used in addresses but they come in handy when explaining to a cab driver how to get somewhere
> Try a European or Asian city with lots of twisty roads and alleys and it gets much harder.
I showed what would happen if you literally follow the rule "whenever [...] there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label".
That's the specification. If you show me a twisty road with no room for a label, then according to this specification it doesn't get the label. The specification (for what we're testing) says "whenever there is room". Whenever there is enough whitespace on the road.
That’s a misunderstanding of the spec. The ask is to put in at least one label if there is space (when previously there were none). Filling all available space with redundant labels is not the ask.
OK, mine is the result of running this pseudocode:
# Label all streets as much as possible
for (each street on screen):
while (that street has room for a label): # (even if already labeled)
put a label on that street # i.e. an additional one
yours is:
# Try to label unlabeled streets
for (each street on screen)
if (no label on screen for that street): # if unlabeled
if (street has room for a label): # ...can we fix?
put a label on that street # ...then fix
(I would usually write this with an && rather than nested if's but I know mobile makes you scroll sideways)
As a followup, could you please define "street has room for a label"? When do you consider that a street has room for a label?
(Too late to edit, but I just noticed that imgur makes my pictures look like garbage on mobile. You may have to request the desktop view briefly to see what I saw when making the comment on desktop.)
Sometimes they do. I second this entire complaining thread; Google Maps really bad as a map. It only works well as a search results display and navigation frontend.
I agree it is a deliberate choice and may even be necessary. The problem is how they identify "clutter". To Apple clutter seems to be street names or useful human scale landmarks. To me clutter is the name of a coffee shop four blocks away that happens to be highly ranked on Yelp when I haven't recently searched for coffee shops.
> To me clutter is the name of a coffee shop four blocks away
Agree, although I don't find it entirely useless; it allows a bit of mental confirmation along the way if you happen to notice something marquee'd go by.
But more generally, there must be a reason or two why this doesn't work, but why leave street name placement "static"? I know it isn't; what I mean is why not accept a touch event to show the name of a street when you tap on it?
It is a touch screen map. Why are the only things I can touch things Yelp wants me to know about[1]?
It seems to me there's a massive lack of imagination going on with maps. Everyone seems to be locust-like scouring for doing anything with them that can turn a quick buck rather than thinking about what they're good for now besides shopping, and could be good for, if-only.
But this is not anywhere near that blue-sky. If figuring out how to make an interactive digital map show the name of the street that is centered on your screen is an unsolvable problem, there's something wrong.
[1] Frankly, I wish I could turn Yelp off, because I mainly only trigger that by accident. But that's a different topic.
> All the time I see a destination and I'm trying to figure out what closest cross street I should stop at
Instead of zooming pinching try to click the street to drop a pin and you got the street name.
Old abstractions (maps) on newer media (phones, desktops) offer a UX that cartmakers in the past could only dream off. It is up to us to break our old habits and discover and use this new UX.
For example. When the iPhone first came people complained about the lack of copy and paste. But most of the time people don't _need_ to copy and paste text, eg they _want_ to dial the phone number they see on a webpage. Therefore they _need_ to have the phone number in their phone app. A problem which can be solved many ways (eg: recognise numbers on a page and make them clickable links directly to phone app) of which copy and paste, though the most familiar, is really one of the worst in UX.
This is the difference between what people (think they) want and what they actually need.
Back to maps. People don't want to read street names, they want the nearest address to a certain s point. Of which zooming and pinching or a cluttered screen full of text are by far the most inferior ways to use of the technology available today.
> of which copy and paste, though the most familiar, is really one of the worst in UX.
I call bullshit on this. I'm using copy/paste on the phone all the time. In using it between many different applications. The way you described it the operation would have to be implemented separately for everything. Text field to phone, text to phone with editing it, phone app (incoming number) to every-single-app-taking-text, etc. I even used copy/paste to write this message.
This functionality is so general we need a solution which works everywhere. This doesn't stop extra functionality that makes some common flows easier (number on the website to phone for example).
The same applies to the street names example. You can add location features without leaving the view with missing names where there's space available.
Your right on that. I'm not trying to say copy paste doesn't have any uses. But a lot of people flock to copy paste as the first (and only) solution to every problem when more UX friendly and effective methods exist.
But personally I cringe every time I have to copy and paste a address on my phone into map or the address book. The software can know its and address, phone number or any other object and provide context specific solutions for it.
I'm afraid you're looking at it purely from a citizen/resident of a developed country. Where I'm originally from, addresses are all mostly a description of how to reach a certain location given the surrounding landmarks.
A close to reality (just changed the exact names) example is:
Firstname Lastname
Second floor North
John Hancock's building behind the Saint Joseph school (Church side)
Neighborhood of the Priars
City
Country
Of course in native language it's more fluid but you get the idea.
> (eg: recognise numbers on a page and make them clickable links directly to phone app)
I hate that! That makes it unnecessarily hard to copy order numbers and the like on my iPhone.
Phoning is legacy functionality, I almost never want to use a number as a phone number.
Copy/Paste on the other hand, that's very useful. I can copy the bits I want, anywhere I want, without dumb as hell software trying to guess what I actually want to do.
Of course it should not hinder the UX of copy pasting in the process. I probably hate that just as much as you.
> I almost never want to use a number as a phone number.
This is the 'what you want and what you need'. You don't want to copy and paste a number into a phone to dial them. You need to have a voice call with the person/company who's page you are visiting or email you are reading.
Google search solves this nicely in their mobile search. They don't show phone numbers or addresses primarely, but buttons to like Call, Navigate, Share and Website. That is what I need when I search a company on Google and essentially what I want.
How about if you could change the context menu in the settings. If you want dial, check that you want dial in the settings, if never use dial, check off in settings.
That's a good way to see it, but the copy-paste comparison is bad. Copy-paste is so low-level that I can do everything with it, without the iOS having to wait years to get the functionality (if ever)
e.g. I want to translate a message. Either I wait for every messenger/OS to get a decent in-app translator, or I use copy-paste into Google Translate — very clunky, but better than not being able to.
The copy paste is bad indeed. But for me it was the first time I saw the difference between what I want and what I need in software. Apple was definitely to late with adding it to their iOS and has not been active enough in providing proper alternatives to copy and pasting like I mention above. Although I'm somewhat of an Apple fanboy (no iphone btw), they really disappointed me with this.
But with most things people hate change and will often not adopt to new things. The famous non Henry Ford quote comes to mind: If you asked people what they want they would wanted a faster horse (and not a car).
I think I'm just sour Apple didn't seize their opportunity to provide the proper alternate solutions for copy paste (before/alongside with it) when they had the chance.
I don't know what the current state on iOS is, but on android you often have context buttons (dial, navigate) next to copy/paste buttons when you select a address or phone number.
> try to click the street to drop a pin and you got the street name.
But then I'd lose my actual destination which is already pinned! And I don't want to lose that pin because I'm going to need to refer back to it. I'm trying to understand the area around it.
> People don't want to read street names, they want the nearest address to a certain s point.
This is exactly the kind of attitude that winds up sounding to my ears as extremely tone-deaf. No, I don't want the address, I already have the address, I want to see the name of the cross street before the address so I know when to slow down on my bike and start looking at the (much harder to read) building numbers.
This has nothing to do with letting go of old abstractions. And considering the #1 complaint I hear about Maps is always "I can't find the street names", this suggests that the "new UX" you're referring to is just bad UX. Just because there's an old way doesn't mean it's bad.
If only some people (like me) want to see street names, maybe it could be an optional layer. You enable the layer it adds a pointer and a label above the map showing the name of whatever's under the pointer. To get the name of something you could either move the map in the normal way or move the pointer.
I would agree that the VLC interface is kinda terrible. They do hide most of the settings that exist behind basic, intermediate, advanced filters though. I know first hand that it is a lot of frigging work to expose more knobs to twiddle on software, so I really appreciate when somebody does let me change things to my liking, even if I'm kind of stumbling into "here be dragons" territory.
I wonder if this varies based on location / version? I just tried Maps on iOS 12.0.1 and it appears to do exactly this, at least in San Francisco. Every time I zoom in on a street, the label fades in right at the center, like you suggest.
Yeah I actually feel like the behavior on Apple Maps is now quite good, especially compared to Google Maps or the old Apple Maps. It would still be nice to display street names even when relatively zoomed out, but at least it has a predictable way to zoom in to find the street name.
> It's obviously an intentional choice to avoid too much screen clutter...
I’m not sure. It seems the maps are much less usable for visual delivery of information. I can barely see the streets because of the contrast choices, the 3D buildings obscure the streets, and the streets are always missing their names. The new Apple and Google designs push us to enter a destination where in the past all I would have needed was a quick glance.
Knowing and tracking where we are going is valuable information to the map providers; helping us get there without finding out where we want to go really isn’t.
The UX studies are taking into account the excess clutter when they aren't necessary. And that is a real problem that I have seen with maps apps that try to display them all of the time.
The problem is that it is really hard to automatically determine what is the most useful thing for the user. Right now, I think the balance is a little too tilted towards not showing them.
I think that one of the evidences of this is how many extreme cases can be shown where they clearly should be shown but they are not. Its much harder to find cases where the algorithm tilts in the other direction by mistake.
> it is really hard to automatically determine what is the most useful thing for the user.
A good observation, but then wouldn't the right UX decision be to give the user a way to indicate that, yes, I really do want to see the label for this item?
I've noticed that I don't know the street names at all.
They are only useful when navigating without GPS. And it's infuriating when you try to use a Google Map as a paper map: there aren't any street names on Google Map to be able to find the correct intersection to turn.
but I agree it's infuriating. I've spoken in the past with some people who work on Maps products and have heard "people say they want it but then they really don't..." and I honestly can't imagine what UX studies are telling them that.
All the time I see a destination and I'm trying to figure out what closest cross street I should stop at and by the time I've zoomed and panned enough to find whatever random faraway place manages to have a label (feels like an unwanted game of whack-a-mole, where will the label pop up??), I can't tell if I've zoomed over to a parallel street instead.
And the solution is so simple too: whenever you zoom in enough that there's enough room on a visible street to put a label, then put the label! I mean if I zoom in so far that only the one street is visible and there's no other text on it, but Maps still leaves it blank... it just feels inexcusable.