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> As a user I've been really unhappy with their designs lately

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.

I also like the new design direction. Haven't had an issue with it.

I like Google products in general, but their UX is pretty mediocre and often counter intuitive. This vapid guideline is yet another example. I have my browser open fairly wide, and all I see is one paragraph of text.

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 hate their maps UX now. Just trying to pull up traffic is incredibly annoying! The whole auto drop-down thing is terrible.

They removed features, too. They used to have a feature that allowed you to view traffic patterns at a future time of day -- what traffic looks like during rush hour vs. weekends, for example.

They didn't but they re-named it. You have to click on "Typical Traffic" and then adjust the time and date from there.

So they've added it back in - that's good to know. It was missing ever since the redesign last year until just recently.

How is it annoying? When I load maps.google.com in Chrome on desktop, the link for "traffic" is shown by default. All you have to do is click once to turn it on.

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.

It's annoying because it's not always present.

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.

It is always present. From the moment you see an overview of possible routes, in the route overview and in the TBT nav.

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.

Sorry I mean the web version. It really is impossible to do both.

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.

That drop down thing has an uncanny ability to do the opposite of what you expect in almost any situation. It's like the UI from hell.

I admire aspects of the technical execution, but the user flow is just so perfectly wrong it's astounding.

I can't use GMaps anymore, which was one of the most wonderful products ever! Still haven't found how to do street view of a specific step in directions.

Those people shouldn't be giving design advice, they should be seeking it.

Material is just a set of guidelines. It's up to the implementer, Google included, to abide by them.

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.