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Comment by SeanKilleen | Hacker News Reader

Waze actually has several features in place to make it safer:

* Waze is designed only to be used by a passenger. Any field that requires typing, etc. warns you if you're moving and makes you acknowledge that you are a passenger to continue.

* Waze has a hands-free capability where you can wave your hand in front of the phone and interact with Waze via voice. It actually works pretty well.

* The UI is designed with big buttons, so even if you choose to interact with Waze regularly, you can usually complete a road road report, etc. very quickly (1-2 seconds).

Regarding its "encouragement". I think alerts and the fact that they're available via audio as well reduces the risk. In the end, it's up the user to configure Waze according to how safe they want to be (which, hopefully is pretty safe).

(I'm a huge fan; I've been using Waze from the beginning. No attachment beyond that though)

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Eh, that may be the intent, but I think they could work harder on making giant buttons for things that you are supposed to use while driving. For instance, the popup that says there is a hazard ahead, and you have tiny buttons to say it's not there or to give a thumbs up.

The "work harder" here is that you don't need to acknowledge pretty much any of those popups in Waze. If you leave them alone, they'll timeout and disappear automatically, you don't NEED to interact with the app while driving, I rarely touch it except to report traffic or a wreck, at which point I'm usually stopped anyway.

Same here -- I turn on Waze before I go somewhere, and then don't touch it (or really even look at it) until I arrive. I figure that the social features are meant for a passenger, or MAYBE if I'm totally stopped at a red light and/or in very heavy traffic. But the notion that I would look at my phone's screen, let alone press any buttons on it, while driving is pretty terrifying.

>But the notion that I would look at my phone's screen, let alone press any buttons on it, while driving is pretty terrifying.

Wha? I just have a windshield mount. It's pretty much the same as any other GPS that you can look at while driving.

I'm an avid user, and my main complaint is, precisely, the UI. Sure, some of the main functions (e.g. traffic report) can be done fairly easily with one hand, but almost everything else is terrible:

- Choosing a navigation destination (slide, pick one from the list, wait not this list - my favorites, search - wait, that doesn't do what I think it does, scroll scroll scroll...)

- Closing those damn popups with the tiny X that is almost impossible to hit (at least on my 3.5" iPhone)

- Pretty much anything involving panning around the map or zooming in/out. It's like the gesture experience is way worse than anything else on iOS, and you definitely feel it.

And some others I can't think of right now. So if one good thing comes from this acquisition [1], I hope it's a massive UI overhaul.

[1]: I'm dreading it, and I fear what will actually happen is the integration of the social network into Google+, and the death of the product itself, somehow subsumed into Google Maps.

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