Google Maps & Label Readability - Part 3 | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps & Label Readability - Part 3

41latitude.com

56 pointsdomino15 comments

If you haven't read the first two parts of this series, you really should. I don't think I've ever read another series of articles about such a boring topic (5x5 pixel buttons, label strokes) that is so damn interesting. The difference between each respective company is immediately visible just by a simple side-by-side glimpse.

I think this is the same sort of 'intense' design that is occasionally remarked about things like Apple's 'breathing' sleep display. Knowing Google, it was probably less of a vision thing and more of an aggressive A/B test thing but the outcomes are undeniable.

Bravo to the author :).

It's really interesting that Google seems to be at times able to pull off wonderful UI design bordering on genius (Chrome, Google Maps) and at other times just barely able to be at par (most of Android with select exceptions). I guess this just reflects different teams within Google, but it's a shame they can't apply their best UI talent across all their products (and particularly, the products that most need it, like Android).

I was thinking more along the lines of exception to the rule. I honestly have some trouble finding another product by Google which has this attention to detail (design-wise), maybe Chrome...

I've never used Android, and I've never quite agreed with the popular assumption that "Google's UI design is bad." What other examples are there?

Background images on google.com

Wait until he notices that the text on Google Maps (on the native mobile app for Android) is now an overlay, and that this extends to road names.

That this has been done to enable things like collision detection of pieces of text, and to enable the jump to 45' view to be smooth and still highly readable.

It's ironic: your HN profile says "My company is Buro 9 Limited and it's a vehicle for me to work with the things I love..." Yet you mock others for what they're clearly enthusiastic about.

Welcome to HN. You're clearly new as this is your only comment and your account is less than 6 hours old.

You also edited your comment from the earlier revision of "Do you not have something intelligent to add" (slight paraphrasing there).

So... just a troll? Unnecessarily scathing for a first post, no?

My comment above was certainly not meant disparagingly or to "pick on" the author. In fact I enjoy the posts made.

Anyone who has worked on producing densely populated diagrams and charts dynamically will have an appreciation for this kind work and would also be keen to hear the subtleties of other peoples solutions to the problem.

My apologies. I thought I detected sarcasm/negativity in your earlier comment--but I guess I was wrong. (I, too, thought the post was excellent and was only trying to defend it.)

I'd say that this design is quite engineer-driven. It seems, their design is 'just' applied knowledge about perception.

A common complaint is that Google is engineer-driven rather than design driven. Some very impressive counter-evidence in the article.

What I meant was a scientific approach to design rather than just designing what looks good. But than again every good interface designer should take that approach.

The micro-scale graphical design is good. It's a pity, however, that big geographical and data quality blunders are present on Google Maps. Examples : world projection (Mercator, useless), lack of metadata (dates of the images ?), choice of labels at medium scale (especially with the 'Relief' maps). Such discrepancy between good graphical precision, esthetics and geographical imprecision, lack of quality information are misleading a large part of the public.

Google has better thought out color contrast too. The other ones are either too monochromatic, or the map details overwhelm the labels (think 90's web page color contrast)

While readability is impressive, the zoom slider could use a slight tweak. It's far too easy to zoom out to the maximum setting when you meant to go one level up.

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