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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading a pop-sci article many years ago about a study that found women were better at navigating by landmark and men were better at more abstract directions like maps and compass directions, with gay men being good at both.

So while this is annoying for me it could be great for the other 50% of the population, would be nice if it was optional.

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I found in my own amateur UX studies that there are drivers who hear "in a quarter mile, turn right" and don't know how far that is, even after having heard that prompt thousands of times. You'd think that after a while they'd build a mental model of the distance. Instead, they seem to just tune out the "in a quarter mile". This is one of the classes of users for which products need to be designed. (I have similar problems with people's heights.)

Also, as a passenger it's fairly easy to say "turn in five blocks" and track how many blocks are left, maybe even while holding a conversation. For drivers, that seems more difficult, probably due to cognitive overload, unless it's just a couple of blocks. And I've noticed that some drivers react to that kind of direction by scanning the view and quickly translating the number of blocks to a landmark.

I’m in that camp where I hear the “in X units of measure turn right” and get confused as I can’t really relate to that when driving vs walking or reading a map — which is the entire reason I’m using voice prompts with the app.

Part of the reason is that my frame of reference in a fast moving car is time and not distance. How many feet Is that car in front of you? Unless it is under 10 mph and under 20 feet I have no idea. I do have some idea about how many seconds it is as I have to know that in order to avoid the car if it stops working quickly.

I don’t know why the apps don’t say “in 10 seconds turn right” or maybe “turn right now!” With an emphasis as that’s how I’m used to getting directions from a passenger.

I'm pretty good with navigation and directions, but those directions become useless for me once the app tells me anything in feet/meters. Once I hear "In 300 feet..." I stop listening and glance at the spatial layout of the roads.

Oh yeah I love when people measure turns by the number of intersections to pass. Things like quarter mile or 1000 ft are hot garbage for me in terms of understanding how close I am to needing to turn, since it depends a lot on how fast I'm moving.

Yeah, I don't understand why mapping software doesn't just say:

* after the next 2 intersections, turn right

* after the next intersection, turn right

* turn right at the next intersection

* TURN RIGHT NOW

* you missed the turn right, ....

Other huge annoyances:

- Not telling you which lane it is optimal to stay on on multilane roads

- Not telling you which road signs to follow outside urban centers via voice

- Not telling you about speed limit changes

In general, I find the guidance to be barely usable instead of being excellent as it could be

> Also, as a passenger it's fairly easy to say "turn in five blocks" and track how many blocks are left

Which is of course region specific. Using it in the UK would be confusing as (often) the roads just aren't laid out like that, and "in X blocks" is almost never used.

Landmarks are fine if it's "the next stoplight", but when it starts naming random businesses I find it incomprehensible because I don't know what to look for. I turned it off years ago because it's really not very helpful (on my Garmin, not google Maps).

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