I'm not a UX expert and don't have the vocabulary to describe what's wrong with it. What I know is that I used to enjoy using it. Not just for directions, but I'd use it for fun to explore new areas. And now I dislike and avoid using it altogether. Similar to Gmail. It's just feels like a mess of UI elements that show and hide and move dynamically, don't have fixed spots on the page, don't work consistently, etc. Like it was excessively focus-grouped or committee-designed.

I know how to get directions in the new interface. I just don't like doing it. Is it more clicks? More elements taking up space I don't care about? Hijacking the native right-click menu? Aggressive resizing/panning when I didn't ask for it, to accommodate what it thinks the new context should be? I don't really know.

Here's a few more: randomly zooming out to full-earth view, changing the area of my search after I've already zoomed in, crashing all the time on mobile, randomly giving me results halfway across the earth, randomly changing my destination when I zoom in, randomly zooming out to full-state view.

These are the obvious ones. There are more subtle UX fumbles too. If I click my house while I'm in my house and click directions, I probably don't want directions to my house. I probably want directions from my house.

Edit: Oh! That ridiculous thing it does when my phone vibrates. Someone decided they could detect frustration by using my accelerometer. Now any time I get a text message and am using maps, maps gets insecure and asks me to submit feedback.

I'm 100% with you. I don't know what's going on exactly, but five years ago it was an example I'd point to of a beautiful, instinctively easy-to-use interface, and today it seems like it never does what I want on the first try. Doesn't matter if it's the web interface or on my Android phone, though I think those are screwed up in different ways.

It has become gnome of map applications. It used to open so fast 10 years ago it was surprisingly amazing, now it takes more time to load and crashes my browser randomly. I dread opening google maps now thinking if I will have to reopen all my tabs, and I literally use it only on chrome now.

I feel uncomfortable using maps these days too. Something about the dynamic moving and bouncing of elements when I'm just moving my mouse makes me insecure. I can't easily figure out where to find things.

I've started to use bing more recently.

On mobile: Do I press, or do I double tap, or do I long press, or is it in a menu, or is it just not available?

I know that tapping will drop a pin, and I don't want to drop a pin, (because there's already a pin from my search and that's in the right place) so I don't want to tap. But tapping is actually what I need to do to get rid of the interface and just leave me with the map. But only after I've done whatever it is I need to do to make the GPS dot active. I'm on a bus. The GPS dot shows me where I am. The pin shows me where my destination is. Maps also shows every bus stop (I complain, but this is one of the things that makes me feel like I'm on StarTrek) but you only get the bus stops if you zoom right in. So, I spend some time zooming in and out. The map images keep loading and unloading. I kind of wish Maps would realise that I need the bus stops. I know there probably isn't a setting for that (because FUCK YOU USER WE KNOW WHAT YOU WANT) so I just keep pinch zooming and unzooming, and hoping I don't miss-pinch and un-drop the pin.

Maps is great if you use it often enough to learn it. I use it just often enough to not remember it next time I go to use it.

(All maps are amazing. I remember using Autoroute from 5 1/4" floppies and a Hercules graphics adapter and that was amazing, so GMaps on that slab of glass does feel like magic. I moan too much.)

On my phone, if I type in the name of a store, it gives me the most popular store of that name in the United States instead of the nearest one, because I have wifi locaiton turned off. That's the only reason. If I turn it back on (I don't want it on), the results are sorted as expected.

This is clearly an intentional anti-pattern, and it's been there for over two years. I have to actually type, for example: "Fry's electronics, city, state" (remember, this is on a TOUCH KEYBOARD) to get where I want to go.

It shouldn't really be in debate that the UX of maps has gone way downhill. There's simply no comparison to the older version and I've never met anyone who wasn't disappointed by the changes.

>On my phone, if I type in the name of a store, it gives me the most popular store of that name in the United States instead of the nearest one, because I have wifi locaiton turned off. That's the only reason. If I turn it back on (I don't want it on), the results are sorted as expected.

I'm assuming you do have GPS location turned on, and that you're allowing location access on that page and waiting for a GPS lock before searching, correct? (And if not, how do you expect it to know where you are?)

Maps used to be much better at searching within the area I'd already focused on. Now whenever I search it seems to either search near my current location or zoom out and search my whole city. It makes it very hard to e.g. look for a bank branch on my route home from work.

This 100x. I don't get it: if I've zoomed in the map or panned, and then make a search -- why isn't it obvious that I want the store closest to the area I'm looking at, and not one 30 miles away?

> if not, how do you expect it to know where you are?

IP addresses are usually enough to get to the right city.

Not on mobile carrier Internet, those can appear as very far from where you are

They know what cell tower you're connected to, don't they? The original iPhone didn't have a GPS receiver, so this was the only way Maps could infer your location.

So much this.

I also liked the one period of time I used to type in my US zip code for Movie Showtimes and somehow be routed to theatres and showtimes in a town outside Naples, Italy. This was on a desktop, not a phone.

Not the biggest deal in the world but it seems every useful thing Google comes up with seems to degrade in quality over time and increase in complexity.

My theory is that this has something to do with the average Googler's tenure lasting 3 years. With such a high turnover, the overwhelming majority of employees are probably much happier achieving the supposed glory of making something new rather than understanding and maintaining the old system.

Maybe another reason for the change is that, back in the Marissa Mayer days, hiring standards used to be much more brutal. Google was still reaping the rewards of bucking the trends of web portals jammed with ads, but eventually lost its confidence in nerd-driven products and instead began to imitate Apple, Facebook, and inexplicably, Microsoft...

Those are good theories.

My personal one is that they just can't stop tweaking. It's not like there aren't some fundamental improvements with a lot of their services but everything needs to get touched and then it ends up like that car Homer tries to design in that episode of The Simpsons.

I know that you're supposed to constantly iterate and try and improve performance, design, etc in software but is there anything in the general literature / case studies of 'improving' too much and degrading the core product(s)?

Not to mention that it's always funny to search for an issue on Google, find the links to the forum, see all the people that chime in with a similar issue, the few souls that try to help, then, as you scroll, the further desperate comments of "They don't care about us." Shouts in the wind.

Are you using the actual native app or just the mobile website? If you have wifi off, it should still have access to your GPS to get your location, unless that is either off or blocked/unavailable.

If the website then how would it know your location if you don't allow it?

There are several better failbacks than "most popular store in the US." Starting with "Store closest to the centroid of past N addresses that I have clicked."

Its actually worse. Only this Saturday I searched for a ice cream shop and it directed me 2.5 miles away. So now I am riding the prescribed route when I see a different branch of the same shop in 0.6 miles. Baffled I looked again at the search results and for some reason this nearest branch was listed at number 5 and I had to scroll down to find it. This when I had GPS and 3G on.

Google has very good geo-IP location detection, almost creepily good in some cases. Scroll down to the bottom of the search results on a desktop browser sometime and see for yourself.

On desktop perhaps but not mobile carrier internet. Those can sometimes show you as a few states away.

I think part of the problem is that Maps looks different at random times. I just took this screenshot to answer your post:

http://i.imgur.com/SaHMCF2.png

Yes, there's a round "Directions" icon. This time. Frequently, searches for a given address don't bring up that icon or any other UI affordance that indicates how I might get directions to the destination.

However, Maps does reliably fill half the screen with photos, random chunks of white space, and other irrelevant visual junk as seen in the above screenshot.

I had absolutely no idea that Maps had a right-click menu, so thanks for that tip (seriously). Right-clicking on an AJAX-based Web page is obviously not a standard or expected UI concept... but given what Google has done with Maps over the last year or so, literally anything helps.

> "Yes, there's a round "Directions" icon. This time. Frequently, searches for a given address don't bring up that icon or any other UI affordance that indicates how I might get directions to the destination."

This is sadly a really common UX failure in a lot of different apps.

One thing that many people still don't seem to realize is that it's more important to be consistent than being smart. I like to call these "hide and seek" UI elements - they display conditionally in an effort to be smart (e.g., no directions are available to this place, so we hide the directions button). But in practice it just confuses users.

One thing I keep encouraging, to varying levels of success, is that UIs should always be consistent. If you are unable to provide a feature, disable that element with a helpful tip (e.g., graying out the Directions button and say "Directions not available from this address" or some such).

My favorite example of this is deleting a draft in gmail. Go make a draft and try to delete it. There's no button to delete it. Unless you click the checkmark! Then the button appears where previously there was whitespace. Ugh.

You have to find a real address before it can give you directions. Otherwise on the default maps page, you can switch directly to directions mode to input both start and end addresses.

http://i.imgur.com/jZyv7gZ.png

I can't say I've experienced the lack of a directions button, but I agree that's a major UI failure.

My beef with GMaps is its performance. The UI is for the most part fine (though there some awful blunders that were later fixed).

Loading GMaps takes forever now and brings my entire browser to a freezing stop (Chrome OSX) until it's done doing whatever it's doing. This is a modern desktop (i7, 16GB RAM, discrete graphics). Even after it's done "loading" if you try to interact with the map right away it does so at a crawl - inputs take multiple seconds to register and panning/zooming runs at about 2 frames a second.

It takes about 10-15 seconds after load for the site to be fully functional and performant. That's insane.

Ditto the Satellite view. Yeah, having 3D buildings is pretty cool and all, but the performance is atrocious on even fast, modern machines. If that's the tradeoff I'll take the 2D satellite imagery back please.

Overall interacting with GMaps is itself a chore, and it almost entirely comes down to bad performance. This is especially frustrating on mobile if you put the performance of GMaps on iOS next to competitors like Apple Maps - the rendering performance is insanely low even on the most up to date hardware like an iPhone 6s.

Beyond performance problems, one thing Google didn't fix until recently was that it was literally impossible to see information on an address/place and nearby transit at the same time. They changed Transit from a persistent overlay that can be toggled to a special view mode itself, which would disable itself the moment you clicked on any point of interest on the map. It makes me wonder if anyone on the Maps team lives in a major city.

Try Lite Mode: https://www.google.com/maps/?force=lite

Too bad they don't tell you about it when your browser hangs.

THANK YOU !

I so much hate the "new" google maps ... anybody has a alternative ? Somehow, I like the tiles of google maps best :-/

I completely agree regarding the performance issues; it's often painful to use on my Nexus 7.

On a puny Macbook Air with 4gb ram and Chrome with 30 tabs open I'm getting perfect framerates and instantaneous UI... perhaps this is something local to your machine?

It's hard to imagine that Google would make a UI that slow given their extensive optimizations.

It's true! Google Maps is really fast on some computers and impossibly slow on others. The only fix is "Lite Mode" as mentioned above, and unfortunately there's no link for that on the main page.

They aren't testing their cool WebGL version widely enough, so it fails badly for many users. (Edit: or wait, is it just a 2D <canvas>? Either way, it should be fast in Safari and it's not.)

You used to be able to just click the directions tab and fill in the from and to in the textually-labelled boxes on the left. Now you have to provide it the incantation in the order it wants; in particular you must put the destination in first and then go back and put the start point after. I don't even know if you can do "via" any more, never mind how. And it seems incapable of remembering what mode of transport I want any more.

You can do via, but not for public transport, and indeed it magically hides the add destination button if you're not in one of the modes it supports (including if you're in the auto-mode and it's suggested a public transport route).

I can kind of see their reasoning, since public transport is often time dependent, but often I don't care about specifics, I just want to get an idea what links exist, and how long I'm going to spend in transport visiting a bunch of places.

You don't have to put the destination first: in the search box, there's a directions button, just press it and it'll show both boxes!

I'm with you on the "it forgets the transportation mode" complaint, by the way; even Google Now seems incapable of using it, despite being able to parrot back the setting in the config panel.

The magical mystery UI is the worst part, actually. I (evidently) have no idea what the capabilities are, because the input boxes appear and disappear arbitrarily when you do things.

Maybe GMaps is just polarizing software that seems awesome to some people and awful to others? Unless you're a Googler and/or on the Maps team? :)

One thing that is absolutely brain-dead is that (in Chrome) I can't type in maps.google.com and tab-search for my address. I can do this with Amazon.com or Netflix, but not an actual Google property? Weird.

Another thing that is just bafflingly absent is that GMaps doesn't know where my home and work are. Not just as locations, but as concepts. (Snide part of my brain wonders if the Maps team just lives at work.)

Another thing is that to make GMaps work with my Mac, I have to have a Chrome Extension to stop the map from freaking out. And then simple things like double-clicking to zoom in seems to have a non-predictable behavior where sometimes it zooms in and sometimes it tries to put a marker on the map.

Not everything in Gmaps is horrible. There are many nice features. But they've allowed the critical path through the software to become obscured and eroded.

Home/Work are supported, you can easily set them if it doesn't learn on it's own: https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3273402?hl=en

Also I'm not sure but it would seem you have some kind of plugin that might be interfering as GMaps is very smooth on Mac Chrome and Safari.

And you might be single-clicking on the maps which brings up a gray marker to show you more detail of the nearest address to where you clicked. It's easier to just use the scroll wheel to zoom in/out.

And you can just put the address in the search bar and the first result on the results page should be the address detail plus links for directions.

I frequently, in Chrome on OSX, get Google Maps in such a state that attempting to interact with the map at all will cause it to "freak out" and randomly zoom or pan somewhere unexpected.

I find it entirely unusable on a Macbook touchpad, and even worse with a magic mouse. Sometimes I forget and go to the site, only to have it freak out on me part way through trying to do whatever I'm doing, while lagging like crazy of course, because at some point Google stopped giving even half a damn about performance, company wide.

Google Music kicks on my fan after a while. The only other thing I run that does that is Kerbal Space Program. One simulates space flight with nice (ok, decent) 3d graphics, the other plays f*cking music.

> One thing that is absolutely brain-dead is that (in Chrome) I can't type in maps.google.com and tab-search for my address. I can do this with Amazon.com or Netflix, but not an actual Google property? Weird.

Works for me, and that's definitely one I've never explicitly set. According to my settings, the tab search just redirects to https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s

I have the same complaint. I can't explain how it has changed, but it used to be easy. Now it is difficult and error prone. I guess I just never paid attention to it when it was easy.

But why is it difficult and error prone now? I frankly cannot see it. What steps do you take, and where do you stumble?

I can't run through it right now, but I guess there are simply too many steps to go from address to navigation. It used to be, as best I recall, input address -> click navigate. The error part comes in from making me visually choose from a list of addresses after I have already put in a specific address (search is not needed). The difficult part comes in to play when I am trying to get somewhere and the app is making me navigate through several interactions.

But you don't need to search. Open maps.google.com, then type the address and click on the arrow; it'll open the two directions input screen with the destination already filled in. Now you can just choose the origin (e.g. click on "my location") and it'll show you the route.

This is the problem. You can't argue a user into accepting that their experience is better. You have a whole swath of people saying maps has gotten significantly more cumbersome over the last few years. Telling the user they are wrong and giving them coping strategies to handle the UX awkwardness is just insulting.

I'm not even a Google employee, let alone a Gmail developer, so I don't see how is it insulting. I'm simply explaining why I don't see the problem being reported.

I also have no problem with gmail currently. I suspect only the people with complaints are being vocal here.

It's gotten leaps and bounds more useful than it was 4-5 years ago. Transit directions are much easier to use. One of the only things I can complain about is that on mobile, if I've conducted a transit direction search then the results I get are for the given time. If I miss a bus or don't leave until a bit later and want to re-run the search again at the current time (some buses may have stopped running if I get delayed leavng party for example), I have to actually input the time on my phone; there's no way to re-run the search with the current time.

It's mind-blowing to me that they wouldn't make it easier to have a transit search use the current time, and instead continue to use a route from anywhere from 15 minutes-3 hours ago. Why would I even be performing the search again if I wanted the same routes.

I have the same problems with modern Maps. Personally, I always type something in maps, weird search cards I don't want at all popup. I click the map which is only a small stripe above the cards to try to get to a map with my placemarkers, then Google Maps forgets my search and hides all the placemarkers. Rinse and repeat several times and eventually Maps gives me my darn map with Placemarkers that I wanted in the first place. I find directions then a whole separate pain in the ass compared to how they used to be as well. Sure, the thing looks better than it used to, but it works terrible.