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