What's wrong with Google Maps? I've just been watching a non-technical friend use it and the only thing that wasn't intuitive was adding an extra stop to her trip (and even then, she discovered it without needing to search for help).

On mobile, I would honestly say that Google Maps is the single most difficult app to navigate.

Add a route between A and B, then slightly scroll on the map. The context information disappears and once you get the bloody thing up again, how do you go back to results? It is infuriating.

My personal pet peeve is getting back to the map after clicking "explore food and drinks near you". There's an arrow at the top left, but it disappears once you scroll, and you might be on a different screen.

On Android, there's a physical back button on the phone, which makes this all so much easier.

That UI is weird. The usual iOS swipe from left to go back gesture doesn't work, which I thought was because of the tabs.. but you also can't swipe between them. Seems silly.

They added the feature that used to bug me the most: when I search, my saved locations now get preferential treatment.

And, yet, the maps themselves are worse: they changed the algorithm for which labels are displayed, making it impossible to cause some street names to appear.

That's by far my biggest complaint. Driving in a dense and disorganized city, street names are sometimes the only way to sort out which of several connected (or vertically-overlapping) streets Maps actually wants me to take.

But with the labelling change, it's impossible to coax out the needed information. Combine that with Google's exotic definitions of "sharp" and "small" turns and it's surprisingly inconvenient.

My two main gripes with Google Maps (on Android):

1. In the most recent version, there is some action (I don't know which at the moment) which makes all UI elements disappear, and I don't know how to bring them back except by restarting the app.

2. My most common use-case is to search for some amenity within a certain area. So I pan and zoom to the area that I want to search, type in my query... and it zooms out to the city level to show me absurdly distant results. I can zoom back in afterwards and do "Search in this area", but it's still annoying every time.

1. Single tap on the map (but not on Points Of Interest) toggles UI visibility.

2. That one is the most annoying thing for me. It usually happens if you search for something that it can't find in visible area, but it looks random. Google Search taught me that you can write a bit sloppy and it still is able to find it. Than in Google Maps it can lead to showing you some cryptic place in another country.

Another annoying thing for me is a language problem. I am living now in Germany, but I am from Poland. You can't do category search in Polish, because it will show you results in Poland. But at the same time if you look on details for the German place you will see category in Polish. So you may not know what Google expects.

Also when you click on category icon from search list (those red icons) it will search in language of the country you're in, but you have to click on a name in your language.

But multiple language support suck mostly everywhere... Chrome offers site translation (some of the time). I prefer translations to English, because they are better than translations to Polish. I also don't want to translate it always, because it is not always needed (and flicker is annoying) or not good enough.

To translate a site to English I have to do this every time (my UI is in Polish, but I will write all in English, but translation is mine):

1. Tap on underlined "Polish" in sentence "Translate to Polish"

2. Tap "Polish" in "Translation language" menu

3. Scroll to the top to find "English"

4. Tap "English"

5. Tap "Ready"

6. Tap "Translate"

7. Ignore annoying confirmation by scrolling or tapping "Ready"

At least translation from context menu is sensible now. You can select text by long tapping and tap translate and it remembers what language you selected earlier and has the most recent used languages at the top of the language list.

So tell me how am I supposed to find a route between x and y from my phone without being on x or y first?

It is doable, but how is it supposed to be done?

(For context: IIRC there used to be a shortcut to navigation for that feature. And yes I think ux designers mindlessly copying each others or Apple are at least partially to blame.(

Hit the directions button. You see two text fields, with the first one already filled out as "Your location". Change that. Enter the destination next.

This was on Android. Is your UX any different?

There is no "directions" button that I can see in Google Maps on my Android.

Bottom right blue circle with icon of a road sign - right turn <↱>. It is quite useful button, it can show you also time tables for public transport near you. But I discovered it by accident so it is not that evident as most icons.

But usually if I want to search for directions not to or from current location I just search for destination and later just change current location to different thing.

What is missing for me is the ability to select time of arrival/departure for car navigation. It is useful to see how traffic is predicted to look like in advance. But you can get something a bit like this (with just enough advance) by creating event in calendar and using Google Now. It will notify you when you must go with taking traffic in consideration.

Thanks! Hidden in plain sight!

(For some reason it seems I only tried the search field and looked in the menu.)

1. Search for x (or y).

2. Ask for directions

3. Replace your location with y (or x).

4. Reverse start and end if necessary.

Personally I think is flow is better than directly entering start and end for two reasons:

- The common case (go from where I am to somewhere else) is faster.

- I don't have to think about how to enter "my location", which isn't obvious (over the years I've seen - typing "my location", searching with the start box empty, pressing a special button for the purpose, and others).

> - The common case (go from where I am to somewhere else) is faster.

> - I don't have to think about how to enter "my location"

IIRC at some point this where solved rather nicely by offering you start location pre-filled with your current address.

Update: As lake99 and hawski pointed out it still is there. Just use the blue-sign-with-white-arrow-up-and-to-the-right (directions) and there the nice one is.

Lack of quality control - the last two-ish months, the search feature on maps has been completely broken for me.

They rolled out a feature to limit search results to locations within your current zoom. Great! Problem is, they reloaded the entire page (not just the results partial) on every change.

The constant flickering made it very difficult to orient yourself around the map. Was infuriating to use and I'm very glad that they've now fixed it.

Using Chrome on a 24" monitor, I get a 2" subwindow for Street View positioning (yellow guy). And it auto hides quickly. Maddening.

They took away the zoom in/out floating buttons on the android maps app, managing to destroy discoverability and single handed operation.

At least on my OnePlus phone, you can double-tap the screen and drag up or down to zoom in or out, like a scroll wheel. It's better than buttons, in my humble opinion.

But not discoverable. There is no visual indicator telling you about the feature. Only trial and error.

Not every feature needs to be immediately discoverable. The default and 'main' way of zooming is the (un)pinch gesture.

Take keyboard shortcuts - they're EXTREMELY undiscoverable, but they're not required for most operations, it's more of a power-user feature.

> Not every feature needs to be immediately discoverable.

Not every feature does. But every function does. If there is no visual indication of how to zoom at all, there are users who will never even discover that they can zoom.

Most programs will list the keyboard shortcut against the menu item for the same feature, that makes them discoverable.

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V works in Android too, among many other classical shortcuts. Try it with a Bluetooth keyboard or over USB-OTG. How about that for undiscoverable in a mobile OS? :)

Off topic, I know, but which OnePlus do you have? Do you like it? I'm considering the OnePlus 3 to replace my 2013 Moto X.

I have the OnePlus One still, actually. It's been in water and dropped on the ground, and somehow is still going strong. For $300, this is the best phone I have ever had, even ignoring the 64GB storage and out of the box rootability.

I've looked at the OnePlus 3, and it seems like a worthy successor. LinusTechTips on YouTube did a review on it. I'd recommend checking it out.

But pinch to zoom is used for everything.

Maps and the occasional website (the browser used to have zoom options too) with crappy css are the only times I really need pinch zoom.

It's annoying as hell when you're holding a coffee and want to zoom.

You're probably outside the 95th percentile on that one, though, and good design targets the rest of the user base. I think most people probably just got annoyed by accidentally hitting those, or by them taking up real-estate or cluttering the view.

> You're probably outside the 95th percentile on that one

In what way? If you mean one handed usage, it's pretty common here when people are standing on public transport, you need to hold on with one hand. If you mean the infrequency I need it, take a look through you're list of installed apps and tell me how many require zooming? Almost all are designed specifically to avoid it.

I agree with all you have written, but there is a way to zoom in or out without using your other hand: use your lips. "Muaa" zooms out, and "auum" zooms in. This will make public transport journeys more interesting (for the others).

I'm not that close with my phone, though.

I probably am. I spent some time in northern Europe, where the temperature would go as low as -25°C, around the time I stayed. I was loath to deglove my barely warm hands, and used my nose instead, for some basic operations.

In maps and chrome on Android you can zoom with one hand by double tapping and dragging up/down

double tap and drag.

http://www.carlsednaoui.com/post/46803524724/google-maps-one...