That's a common use case. The problem with Google maps (and the problem with a lot of modern software) is, as you say, it makes a lot of guesses.

The definition of a good user interface is "to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother"*

Google Maps is great for finding directions to a very specific place. But after mapping those directions, doing almost anything else destroys that route. If I have to (and I do) open multiple map tabs, or repeatedly enter the same route info after making a search (if I'm on a phone) it is not a good UI.

*https://www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/

Am I missing something - this use-case is already supported! You choose start & endpoints, then your start the trip (which "saves" them) - you can now search and add as many waypoints as you desire

For example, do a map of San Francisco to New York City. Now you want to visit the world's largest ball of twine, so you add a waypoint, and start typing "Ball of Twine" and a drop-down will appear with a few choices, pick the one you want and it'll add to the map. You can re-order them as needed to optimize your route.

You still need to know the name or address of the waypoint you want to add, but that's the case with paper maps and is a good use of browser tabs to search for it.

One important factor in a good UI is that it is discoverable! If you build an amazing feature but forget to inform the user about it, you've wasted the work.

The above is not a foregone conclusion, but it was how I thought until I read your and parent's postings about it, and I'm a techie. For every 1 techie that doesn't know about a feature, there are 1,000 users (or something like that).

I would posit that the discover-ability difficulties are present whether someone is in a TUI or a GUI.

If you hit start before, it starts talking a lot, and that's annoying.

To be fir, I've never really wanted this feature much, so I haven't tried to find it.

(There's a less blurry mkv at http://paste.stevelosh.com/1983.mkv for those that want it.)

I go to `maps.google.com`. The page loads a search box, with my cursor focused inside it. Then it unfocuses the search box while some other boxes pop in. Then it refocuses the search box. Is it done thrashing? Can I type yet? I wait for a few seconds. I would have already entered in my query by now in 1983. I sigh. This bodes well.

I guess it's as done as it's ever gonna be. I search for "rochester ny to montreal qc". I wait for the screen to load. It finds me a route, which is actually good. Step one done.

Now I want to find a restaurant somewhere in the middle. Let's try just browsing around. I find somewhere roughly in the middle — Watertown seems like a good place to stop.

I zoom in on Watertown. I wait for the screen to load. I look around the map and see some restaurants, so I click one. Now I want to read the reviews, so I scroll down to find the "See All Reviews" link. My scroll wheel stops working after I scroll more than an inch or two at a time, until I move it out of the left hand pane and back inside it. I sigh, wiggle my mouse back and forth repeatedly to scroll down and click on the link.

A whirl of colors — suddenly the map zooms in on the location. Why does it do this? I wanted to read the reviews, not look more closely at the map! Now that the map is zoomed in, a hundred other points of interest are suddenly cluttering the map. I wanted to read reviews about this restaurant, and suddenly 3/4 of my screen is filled with text about other places. I sigh.

I ignore the garbage now cluttering most of my screen and read some reviews. This place seems fine. I click the back arrow, then click Add Stop to add it to the route. I wait for the screen to load. Suddenly my screen whirls with color and zooms out, losing my view of Watertown. I sigh.

My trip is now 8.5 hours instead of 5.5, because it added the new stop at the end. AlphaGo can win Go tournaments, but I guess it would be too much to ask for Google to somehow divine that when I add a stop in the middle of a 5.5 hour trip, I might want to visit it on the way by default. I sigh and manually reorder the stops.

Let's also find a gas station somewhere before Montreal, because I like to get gas before I get into the city so I don't have to deal with it once I'm in. Cornwall seems like a good place to stop.

I zoom in on Cornwall. I wait for the screen to load. I don't see any gas stations markers, but that's fine, there's a button that says "Gas stations" on the left! I click it and the screen goes blank. I wait for the screen to load. I've suddenly been whisked away to downtown Montreal instead of looking around where I'm currently centered on the map. Guess I should have read the heading above the buttons first. I sigh.

I click "back to directions". I wait for the screen to load. The map does not return to where I was previously, it just zooms to show the entire route, throwing out my zoomed-in application state. I think back to Gravis' tweet of "gmaps wildly thrashes the map around every time you do anything. Any time you search, almost any time you click on anything" and I sigh.

I rezoom in on Cornwall. I wait for the screen to load. The gas station button didn't work, but surely we can search, right? I don't see a search box on the screen, so I roll the dice and hit Add Destination. This gives me a text box, so I try searching for "gas stations" and pressing enter. This apparently didn't search, but just added one particular gas station to the route. It also zoomed me back out, throwing away my previous zoomed in view.

I rezoom in on Cornwall. I wait for the screen to load. I notice the gas station it picked happens to be across the US/Canada border from the route. That clearly won't work. I sigh and remove the destination. This zooms me back out (I wait for the screen to load), throwing away my previous zoomed in view.

I rezoom in on Cornwall. I wait for the screen to load. I click Add Destination again and this time notice that when my cursor is in the box, there's a magnifying glass icon — the universal icon for "search" — right next to the X icon (which will surely close the box). It even has a tooltip that says "Search"! Aha! That was well-hidden, UI designer, but I've surely defeated you. I click the magnifying glass icon and it… closes the input box. I… what? I sigh, loudly. It has also zoomed me out, throwing away my previous zoomed in view. I wait for the screen to load.

I rezoom in on Cornwall. I wait for the screen to load. Okay, apparently I can't search to try to find routes. I guess I'll resort to browsing around the map again. I notice what looks like a gas station called "Pioneer" and click on it. Cool. But then I realize this is on a bit of a side street. Surely I can find a gas station along the main road. Let me just cancel out of this location by pressing X.

My entire route is completely gone. All that time I just spent, flushed down the toilet. To add insult to injury: this is the one time that it didn't automatically zoom me out and lose my view of the map. It just threw away all of my other state.

Fuck this. I'm with Gravis.

After you accidentally lost your route, you could have just used a built in feature of your browser to get yourself back to where you were.

EDIT: The rest of your post was entirely accurate. Google Maps is a slow, stuttery mess on literally every platform I've ever used it on recently. At least the back button works...

This is all much worse on the Android app as well, where it makes the assumption that your use case is to get from where you are right now to somewhere else. Trying to get from point A to B, where neither is where you are now, is unnecessarily frustrating.

That strikes me as a fantastic assumption. I wonder what percentage of routes involve the user’s current location? I bet it’s high!

It just worked for the default case but when you needed something else it was straightforward to do that.

I open the app, click my destination, and then click "Directions". The very next thing is both of those boxes, with "current location" defaulting to the start location. I can then change that if I want.

It optimizes for my most common use case, but allows me to do it otherwise, too. I don't think I could design this better.

That seems pretty decent UX wise?

* What about stops along the way?

* What about saving the results for later?

* What if you want to do some other mapping task in the middle of all this?

* Are the directions given feasible?

- Open Maps

- Search destination. It autocompletes after about 5 characters

- Select destination

- Screen changes to infobox about the location. There is a prominent "Directions" button

- Press "Directions"

- It changes to a route view, the Start is autocompleted to Current Location but obviously editable

- Press into start location edit box

- I can type location or "Choose on map"

This process requires essentially the minimum possible information from me (I want directions, from A, to B). What is frustrating about it?

compare this to the original that they "simplified" away:

- Open app in navigation mode (step 1)

- it shows two boxes, where you are going from and where you are going to

- fill said boxes. There is a button next to from to choose current destination. (step 2 and 3)

- click get directions (step 4)

Compared to the current "simple" version it is immediately clear and there are fewer steps and less things you need to know.

1) Open app 2) Search for start 3) Select start 4) Search for destination 5) Select destination 6) Click directions

Here's the parent's way:

1) Open app 2) Search destination 3) Select destination 4) Select directions 5) Search for start 6) Select start

They're the same process.

1. Open app in navigation mode (there was a separate icon for that)

2. Accept default start or type if you don't want the default.

3. Point at destination

4. Type destination and enter

Besides it was immediately obvious when I opened the app for the first time on my first smartphone, it just made sense and still does when I think about it.

Edit: I reread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21836204

I exaggerated wildly and can get it down to 5 steps. It is by definition discoverable since we have all discovered it, but I hold that it is still not obvious or self-explanatory in any way.

Gmaps right now works like this:

1) Open App 2) Click search box 3) Either select a destination from the list that pops up or start typing and actually search. Once that's done the route pops up with your travel time. 4) Click start

If you want to change your start:

4) Select the starting location 5) Search or select from the list that pops up and your route and travel time are show. 6) Click start

It's not rocket science. It's all obvious from the UI.

I see no reason that supporting this thing that old mapping software used to support would elevate it "above" other use cases. If you just want a single route, you do one search and you see the result and you never click the "add" button, no problem.

I should dig out an old Delorme Street Atlas CDROM and install it in a VM, to get some sense of how many clicks it took to do the things I used to do. I don't think it was many. It was definitely pickier about address entry; that's one place Google has absolutely improved. But aside from that, it was way more powerful at pretty much everything else.

And your answer to someone asking "Why do you think that use case is that common?", your first line literally just talks about your use case from your point of view:

> This is exactly what _I_ usually want to do with maps. _I_ have a route _I_ want to plan, and _I_ want to do more than one thing along my route, or see what else is in the area. It's futile in Google Maps.

I'm not saying that wouldn't be useful, it's just that maybe not that many people need it... I guess it was built with the idea that you would just open more tabs to search other things?

Based on what I've seen from Google product design, this is a pretty bold assumption.

While Google has access to unfathomable amounts of data collected from users, it's more than happy to eschew that if the data conflict with higher-level product or company strategy decisions, which generally are much less motivated by raw user data,

On a 4-5 hour road trip, I want to take the kids to see a castle or something somewhere around 1/2 to 3/4 of the way. Even just wanting to have lunch somewhere other than Hilton Park or Newport Pagnell would be such a use case.

I have also wanted it for visiting someone - I'm going to their house, what is my most convenient option for buying some wine and/or flowers on the way?

I have wanted it when I've been away from home and have a big time gap between finishing my planned activities (or having to check out of my hotel) and my train or plane departure. What is the best way to spend a few hours that is anywhere on the route from here to the airport/station.

Everything is oriented around the model of "reserve a hotel", "reserve a flight", like you really are on rails like a European.

Today's online maps aren't up to the freedom that motorists have to make small deviations from a route. For instance if I drive from here to Boston I am likely to stay at a hotel en-route, that could be anywhere from Albany to Worcester. I don't have strong feelings about where, but it might be nice to find a good deal or find a place that I think is cool.

Thus I am interested in searching along a tube around my route, not clicking on cities like Springfield and running a search at each one.

That's why desktop web search is less valuable to Google than mobile web search, mobile web search is less valuable to them than map search, map search is less valuable than voice search and voice search while driving is their holy grail because there the ranking game is completely winner takes all. A second page hit on desktop has a better chance at getting traffic than the second place overall in voice while driving. (And those sweet "while driving" hits will almost always be followed by actual business transactions, whereas the old desktop is just a mostly worthless page view)

Afaik Google is far from allowing businesses to directly bid for that coveted number slot (it would ruin their ability to keep the balance between attracting advertisers and attracting eyeballs), but the result is even better for them: when businesses "bid by proxy", via buying other ad products in hope/fear that it might be a factor in the ranking they don't just get the winner's money. I'd absolutely say that drivers are very high on Google's audience priority list, it's just that nobody on that list is a customer.

The visiting example for me is normally a non-car use case. If going by car, I would probably pick these things up close to home and carry them all the way.

Of course, that's where Google makes their money from the service. Google Maps isn't a public good, it's a line of business.

I use Google Maps almost daily and this is also my complaint. It's not a hyper-specific use case. Google Maps are good for navigating from point A to point B when you are sure of both, but they suck at being a map. For instance, lack of always-on street names and weird POI handling makes them problematic to use when you want to explore the area you're in.

We would study the map ahead of time, based on the map figure out our plan of action by either making mental notes or notes in notepad, or notes on a map and eventually execute our plan based on the information we have selected.

We no longer need to do that. We can decide "I want to do something around X" , go to X and when we want to do something specific ask maps "Where can I find Y around X"?

Ability to drop pins removed the need to study map to complete most of the tasks. When one stumbles upon something interesting while reading a book, watching a show, scrolling through eater, one can drop a pin on a map so next time that person is in the area the pin is there!

Studying a map ahead of time and marking it up (on the map itself, as we did with paper maps and dry-erase or permanent markers) is a more efficient interface. There's this forgotten principle in UI that users can mentally filter out noise and focus on relevant parts very good; that's what our sense of sight is optimized for. Having to actively search whenever you need to know something is an inferior experience, both in terms of efficiency and because of missing context.

(Also, dropping permanent pins is AFAIK impossible in the Google Maps proper; it's a feature of "my maps", which is hidden somewhere and has weird interactions with Google Maps.)

You are thinking about it as a synchronous workflow. Study map->create a plan->execute a plan. This workflow was the only workflow because it was impossible to execute a search when needed.

Google maps is optimized for a modern workflow. "I'm here. I need X. How do I get there?" With pins that workflow is asynchronous.

For example, I use pins for restaurants. I find/read something about a place I want to try at some point. I drop pins. Next time when I happened to be in the area I see the pins that I dropped. It may happened to tomorrow or three months from now. My alternative is yelp with its sync workflow - search and analyze results of a search or rely on my memory of what place should be around where.

I hate when I need a restaurant or gas station ALONG MY ROUTE and yet years later no maps have this ability. It's insane.

It has been a cornerstone of digital navigation since the things were invented. To claim that it's an edge-case ignores history and instead highlights how _you_ use the tools.

IMHO it was more obvious that Google wants to you 'actively search' for $waypoint item while enroute instead of pre-planning. "hey google, show me restaurants near me"

That gives them a better way to monopolize on advertising and forced $ from companies in order to stay relevant and appear in those type of searches.

To add to the "things are getting worse" narrative, we implemented this properly back in the days when sat navs were still relatively exciting things. Last I saw the algorithm was to do a lightweight route plan through nearby search results and find the ones that made the smallest difference to your arrival time at your final destination. I don't think the google maps search API does that yet, although I haven't worked in the area for quite a while.

give it a go.

Bret Victor has a great essay on building information software called “Magic Ink” [1]:

> Information software, by contrast, mimics the experience of reading, not working. It is used for achieving an understanding—constructing a model within the mind. Thus, the user must listen to the software and think about what it says… but any manipulation happens mentally. Except possibly for signaling a decision, such as clicking a “buy” button, but that concludes, not constitutes, a session. The only reason to complete the full interaction cycle and speak is to explicitly provide some context that the software can’t otherwise infer—that is, to indicate a relevant subset of information. For information software, all interaction is essentially navigation around a data space.

Of course, guessing poorly is a problem, but that’s an issue with execution.

[1] http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#interactivity_considered_har...

The problem is guessing poorly, and making it cumbersome for the user to override your guess.

The thing with Google Maps was that it was actually reasonably good and intuitive on mobile until sometime 5 or 7 years ago when someone decided it had to be "simplified".

The old version was easy: you enter "to" and "from", and it gives you a route.

I think it also had multiple entry points so you could choose "navigate", "browse" and "timeline" or something directly from the system menu.

The "simplified" version removed all that + the timeline feature I think and replaced it with one search box.

The timeline came back after a while as did a number of other features they removed but it still isn't as easy or intuitive as the early versions and it still annoys me every time I want to get a route from A to B (as opposed to from where I am now to B).

Compare this to Windows 95 that I disliked for a few months until I got used to system wide drag and drop and realized it was in fact better than Windows 3.1.

All Google stuff ended up doing this when they started trying to standardize their "design language" across their services. They developed a very annoying habit of hiding every useful function or bit of relevant contextual information inside a poorly marked hamburger menu somewhere. It's extremely annoying from a discoverability perspective and I strongly suspect any UX designers involved lost a lot of arguments for a decision like that to get codified.

Is there a single person who prefers the monochrome GMail UI where you can't easily visually parse one thread from another, or the "new and improved" functionality where you need to click at least 2 or 3 times to even SEE what address you're sending to or from, or to change the subject?

I've stuck with Android until now, but now that I can replace the keyboard on iPhone I gave it a chance and I'm super happy with it.

iPhone 7 I had is noticeably laggy with maps and other heavy apps.

Meanwhile my Samsung S10e (equivalent to the XR) has more than sufficient performance and has a better screen for a lower price.

My point is that my current iPhone is the first phone since my Samsung S2 that hasn't disappointed me by being slow more or less immediately after unboxing it.

So you are telling me that wanting to see the name of a given street without having to zoom 10000x (and even then sometimes...) or figuring out how to get the directions to and from somewhere are "power users needs"?

Give me a break. Google maps was way easier to user as a map before. Now it prioritizes ad revenue at the expense of what users actually want to do.

There are no "power users" in this new world.

Edit: In fact, I just confirmed it now. Opened up Google Maps and started looking at small roads. For the third road I checked, Maps wouldn't show a name no matter how far I zoomed in, and I had to drag the view as described above.

Note that none of the larger roads leading to the roundabout at the top-left is named, while some (but not all) smaller streets names are here. Instead you have the "D509" label copy/pasted haphazardly but that's not the actual name of the boulevard that would be used on a post address so it's of very limited use (and even leaving those labels in there's plenty of room to add the actual street name).

Here's Open Street Map for the same map at a similar zoom level: https://svkt.org/~simias/up/20191219-175553_map-osm.png

OSM doesn't have all the bells and whistles of GMaps, but as far as the map itself it's vastly superior IMO.

Yes he does. You touch anything and state is erased. Don't know exactly which one of the search results you want to go to? Tough shit, the interface works against you.

And still, getting directions used to be simpler. Now you have to decipher unlabeled hieroglyphs, and the interface keeps changing. You can't even get used to it. You are constantly being nudged to do shit that is not what you really want to do, such as "exploring your neighborhood".

> And I've never had an issue with Google maps hiding street names when there was ample room to show them, but if you're more than a little zoomed out, there isn't that room. Showing only major roads is a decent trade off, as is the mouse scroll wheel for zoom in/out.

Luck you, I guess. I have this problem all the time. A better trade off: if I searched for "Market Street", show that label! That would be a start. And frequently labels aren't shown even when there is plenty of space.

Oh, and why not show the scale of the map by default? Is this also a "power user" feature? I thought it was a crucial piece of information when reading a map...

> Or maybe it's my own failure of imagination: how would you improve in this particular area?

Easy. Revert to the interface circa 2010. It had none of the above problems.

I should be able to get directions without having the GPS. If the GPS is lost, I really need those street names, NOW, without touching my phone.

None of the above is about power users. And none of this is innate to today's hardware. It's a matter of prioritization.

And consumers, though initially swayed by shiny objects, do eventually respond to good design and good engineering. Indeed Google itself found its early success partly through clean and thoughtful design, at a time when other search engine websites were massively cluttered and banner ads were the bane of the Web.

They keep changing the interface faster than I can learn it.

The way to enable complex expression of tasks in a user interface is by composition. ie have microtasks that you can then combine in different ways.

That's what makes excel great - each cell is a single function but you can combine them to build stuff the developer never knew was possible.

Being able to store state ( a location ) and then operate on that state is a pretty basic building block of a composable map UI.

I can't, because the autocomplete/dropdown/prediction for saved locations is disabled if you don't enable Google's device-wide "Web and App Activity" spyware function. This means I have to type my address every time I want directions home, even though I manually saved it. It's hot garbage.

Another very common usecase which is impossible: getting directions to a place and then looking at the street view so I'll know what it looks like. I have to remember to check street view before the search or redo the search entirely. Again, hot garbage, and inexcusable for a company spending bazillions of dollars on UX people.

Then I manually place everything back to where I actually wanted it and had it in the first place, and lo and behold it's showing me every kind of restaurant instead of Chinese restaurants. I have to click the search this area button which of course conveniently wasn't on the original screen to get the results I wanted in the first place.

Then I click on a restaurant to look at the pictures and read the reviews and when I'm done I naturally click the back button and it's all gone. I'm back to some other screen, maybe an empty map or one of the screens I was on previously that I didn't want, but it's almost never the list of Chinese restaurants in the small geographic area I was researching in the first place.

And that's just one example of one problem I regularly have with Google Maps. It's a horrible horrible user experience if you aren't using it in the way they think you should be using it.

I don't think this is a power user use case. Everybody wants to look up Chinese restaurants at a family or friend's house at some point in their life. Why is this so fucking hard?

> popular service 'x' doesn't exactly fit my power user need 'y'

Being a power user isn't a function of geekness, or a mark of belonging to some niche. Being a power user is a function of frequency and depth of use.

My wife is a power user of a particular e-commerce seller backend, a certain CAD software, and Excel, all due to her job. She is not technical, but when you spend 8 hours a day each day in front of some piece of software, you eventually do become a power user. Teenagers of today are power users of Snapchat, because they use it all the time.

Software being "power user friendly" isn't about accommodating existing power users; it's about allowing power users of that software to appear. It's about allowing the room for growth, allowing to do more with less effort. Software that doesn't becomes a toy, inviting only shallow, casual interaction. It's not all it could be. And it's the worst when software that was power user friendly becomes less so over time - it takes back the value it once gave to people.

This was a quality of life improvement for the vast majority of users, even if it wasn’t for the minority who used it the most.

All these threads about software being worse and "perceptually slower" than it used to are about regressions. Google Maps and other mentioned tools aren't pushing the envelope. They aren't bleeding edge. They were science fiction made manifest 10-15 years ago, and since then actually decayed in utility, ergonomics and performance. Meanwhile, all the money invested in all the software and hardware should have given us the opposite outcome.

What I have good memory about though is GMail. I've been using it for 10+ years now and that really keeps getting slower and heavier over time, while offering no extra functionality to compensate.

Google may track latency metrics for all their services, yet somehow, the stuff they do is one of the most bloated stuff out there. I guess they don't look at, or care, about those metrics.

It shouldn't be like this in theory. Computers only ever get faster (occasional fixes for CPU bugs notwithstanding). So making software slow down requires active work. So does removing or breaking useful features.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/

I've seen this a lot with my mother in particular, who is certainly not a power user but knows enough to get by, struggle to use software that's trying too damn hard to guess what she wants, instead of letting her just tell it what she freaking wants.

Apple seems to get it right pretty consistently, which is why I keep their stuff. But when it does manage to go wrong, holy shit debugging it is an absolute nightmare.