You've been unhappy, while I've been extremely happy. In day to day usage, I find the new Maps is a net positive whereas the previous one was both overcrowded and cramped. The new design scales as with whatever device I'm on, it behaves the same while offering the best use of available real estate.
> trying to make things look pretty and screwing over their users
They have consistently iterated towards a more cohesive, better thought out design language. Their "Material design" is the culmination of this process, embodying the principles of good design while covering a large spectrum of input and output devices. This is an incredible challenge and I feel they're well on their way to achieve this goal.
Yet, if I halve the width of the browser while maintaining the height, I get more a lot more content. That's not really good responsive design.
I click introduction. Again, huge meaningless illustration and not even a shred of text in sight. What illustrations there are, don't even correlate to the accompanying text.
Now, once you start driving into Layout, Style, sections, things get more meaningful. But in order to get to those content, you need to use the hamburger icon to toggle the left nav, because left nav is collapsed by default.
This is a kind of design that invites 90% drop off rate.
I admire aspects of the technical execution, but the user flow is just so perfectly wrong it's astounding.
On mobile, it's the very first option in the drawer, and if you turn it on it stays on until you turn if off again.
Ex: I look up my favorite pizza place and it's 15 minutes away. Now I want to see traffic. How? It's impossible to view both.
If you're not seeing traffic all the time, it either means:
- there's no congestion at all in the route that you picked
- you have a different version of maps than the latest one in the play store
- you didn't select driving directions, but either bus, walking, biking or something else.
- traffic for your location/city is simply not supported.
On mobile? I think it's even worse. Look up your nearest favorite chain and it zooms in on what it believes is the one you're looking for. What if it's not? There's a tiny 3 lines in the search bar that I apparently have to click to list all locations.
And anytime I snap to location? It zooms in. Really I'd love to just write the few lines of code it takes to toggle between current zoom level and default zoom level when snapping to location.
And they've stripped features. New UI is fine but at least keep old features nestled around somewhere. I used to be able to look up directions and then nestled in settings view "gas stations along the way". It's near impossible to do that now.
Those people shouldn't be giving design advice, they should be seeking it.
Apple has violated their own design guidelines on many occasions. Google has just never had anything like this (or at least to this degree of detail) in place, so they have much more distance to cover in order to catch up.
Their design patterns fail in user testing too. Moving actions to an unlabeled icon in the top right like they recommend to Android developers now instead of a large clear button just causes users to never find the action.
The recent Android Wear release is similar. All notifications are stripped of anything but text and an image and there's no way to put a button in where users may want one like the notification API already supports with RemoteViews. Google is forcing a certain look on the developers at the cost of the users.
I think their whole design initiative is just trying to make things look pretty and screwing over their users, personally.