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’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'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)
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]
[0]: See https://what3words.com/ and Google's https://plus.codes/
[1]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/isochrone-maps-commute...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
In any case, it seems reasonable to want a 'navigation' map without a specific path, just as you can get a 'discovery' map without a specific search.
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 :-)
Gmaps & Co. have become even more tiresome to use since I actually have experienced how much more comfortable it could be.
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.
Agreed. Happens on google maps too, and that's just so irritating
I put in a random street (mission street in San Fransciso), this how it looked for me on desktop:
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.
The "after" is much more beautiful/useful.
But notice two streets are blank: https://imgur.com/a/I24REM0
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.)
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!
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.
I read a comment, this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18359646 - which I replied to. First I'll quote it in full then we'll break it down.
>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.
There could even be an invented special "road" font that helps people further disambiguate it visually from all the other map labels.
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 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.
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.)
?
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").
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.
(it just says 'roadroadroad', 'houseshouseshouses', 'riverriverriver' ... :))
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!
For non-slavic speakers, I especially like how it stops at the border, so you can get half a screen of normal map and half a screen of strange words.
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
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.
# 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
# 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
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?
Here's an app of a company I worked for, that cares about non-shopping use cases: https://windymaps.com/app
Maybe they would appear if you zoomed in even further, but at that point the map would be pretty useless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dude, are you serious?? There is literally no excuse not to just show the damn street label. Stop blaming users for bad UX.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Also VLC and a few other weird fringe holdouts...
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 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.
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?
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.
"AVs navigate themselves—so all we’ll really need to know is where we want to go. And Google, with a rapidly-growing autonomy project of its own, seems to have caught on to this.
"If you zoom out on Google Maps’s recent features, you’ll notice that they’re increasingly about figuring out “where to go?”
"And even Google’s map seems to be following this pattern. Over the last two years, Google has gradually been turning it inside out, from a road map to a place map.
"Is Google future-proofing itself against a not-too-distant world that has little need for driving directions? Whether or not that’s true, it does seem as if place information might be even more important tomorrow than it is today."
The difference is that it was designed as a premium option to solve a problem for a user. Modern smartphone apps appear to be more about gathering data and steering users to the platform owner's desired destinations.
When driving in some countries in Europe a GPS will repeat that you should use <really long badly pronounced street names after an old white guy> for multiple steps when in fact the road signs don’t mention the street anywhere and just say “Center”. (Granted sometimes the GPS directions are correct and use signage info.) Or the street name may have changed 5 times, as you keep driving straight on the same road.
The problem, as with all things in maps, isn’t so clear-cut and the fixation on street names is very centric to certain countries.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
Also, Mapbox has a powerful map styling UI that lets you choose exactly what map elements to display at a given zoom level:
We can basically build or contribute to alternatives that better suit our needs.
I find it hard to believe that so much work could go into maps when actually using it doesn't seem to be the main goal. How am I going to use this greenery information?
Sometimes I just can't type name in local language correctly but I know the street name where it is and yet I can't find it by looking at the map without extreme zoom in. Searching the street name seems to give a completely random point. I end up zooming to random streets where I think mine should be over and over until I find my street - what a ridiculous process.
There's so much empty space - this obsession with form over function has to stop.
I've switched to one of openstreetmaps clients for this reason alone. They're not afraid of showing actual information.
I just don't think it's a priority anymore -- they want the map to "look pretty" and people to use turn-by-turn nav.
I agree it's a shame and extremely frustrating.
So to some extent Apple's designers and developers know the value of understand what streets are around, but that knowledge isn't evenly distributed/applied.
Hopefully they aren't using a time on screen engagement metric. That would explain why they ended up with a harder to use app. I have to look at it longer.
Either way it suggests to me Apple is solving the wrong problem in the long term.
This reminds me of all the complaints about Apple's Touch Bar, saying there aren't affordances for touch typing.
If I have to walk up 10 blocks and across 5 blocks, my route is going to depend on the traffic lights. "Directions" aren't what I want, what I want is to know where the thing is in terms of landmarks I know and can recognise, and that mostly means street names.
I live in an urban place and mostly use maps as you've described - but when I visit my family in suburban FL, the closest major cross streets for the restaurant could be a mile away, on a highway which has the same name for hundreds of miles, and the street number for the business might be in the tens of thousands but you don't really have a concept of where "0" is. Turn-by-turn is much more useful there, if for nothing else knowing that your right-hand turn is roughly 3/4 miles from where you are right now.
The first would seem valid, if Mission St is, as I gather, rather important. FWIW: after searching for Mission District, the street is now visible far more often. It's labeled even at a zoom level where the water on the east and west are comfortably within the frame.
The decision of de-emphasising street names for the benefit of landmarks/museums/event locations etc. is rather subjective: I often use Maps for purposes other than directions, such as getting a feel for an apartment's neighbourhood, finding restaurants, exploring places in the news, or that appeared in books or movies, or even just "sightseeing".
For all these purposes, the style of Google and Apple Maps is obviously far better than traditional folding maps.
You seem to do direction planning the "old-school" way of manually planning a path from A to B. But that mode has been somewhat deprecated, because typing an address and getting a specific route happens to be far better for this purpose. It's not so much decreasing skills in map reading the luddites so often bemoan: In unfamiliar locations, Google has so much more information, such as both typical and real-time traffic, specific expected times to negotiate every intersection, up-to-date road closures etc. Plus a slightly better shortest path algorithm than eyeballing it.
To get back to shrubbery: I rather shrug. Because you're right that it's less important than roads. But by its nature as just the background colour, I believe it does not actually compete with street labels, at least not in the way that other labels do.
This would seem to call for a small set of 'detail view' modes in the UI. I.e., a 'navigation' mode that priortizes street names over other details. And a 'remote sightseeing' mode that emphasies POI's over street names, etc.
Google knows they're there because they do show up in a search, but that doesn't work if you don't remember the name. I saw a restaurant while walking, went to look it up later, knew it was somewhere on a particular street, and had to resort to Street View to find it. Luckily the last Street View picture was from just after the restaurant first opened.
Presumably these businesses haven't ever paid for advertising.
Apple Maps is no better in my area. It has a few popular places and one shop that was demolished in 2002.
Really. It seems they actually put some effort into showing the names of most streets except the one you're interested in. No, really.
It's amazing how often this happens, because it's almost mind reading at this point.
What would be awesome is if the UI didn't assume I wanted to drop a pin when I'm pointing at a spot on the map - it could popup the info with an option to add a pin, or just touch away to not do that.
Apple and Google maps are both worthless as maps without typing in an actual address and using navigation because they can't just show the main cross street names on the screen. It absolutely blows my mind that map products ship without street names clearly visible at all times.
The before/after map of downtown SF actually shows less useful data about the city. It no longer shows the names of Mission or Market streets. The fancy 3D representations of buildings don't help me negotiate on the ground.