Labels

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Evolving the Google Maps design and experience

We've just launched a new, cleaner UI for Google Maps, as part of a larger redesign of all Google properties. After all the effort we've put into making the map itself cleaner and more efficient, it's time to give the UI outside the map the same attention.

Here's how the UI looked after we underwent the last redesign in 2008:



And here's the new UI for 2011:



More details and examples can be found on the Google Lat Long blog, and for more information on the Google-wide redesign, the Official Google blog.

2 comments:

Owen Evans said...

I like the redesign and the new look of the maps.

Suggestion for the next iteration:

I would like to see transit lines on Google Maps all over the world displayed in the same uniform way. The best way seems to be somewhere along the lines of how they are displayed in east asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong. South Korea is my personal favorite. This means:
(1) Transit lines show up even on the main map view and are a part of the main map layer, not a poorly integrated overlay that must be turned on separately.
(2) The transit lines show up in their proper colors, thin but easy to see even at fairly wide zoom levels
(3) The outlines of stations are drawn when zoomed in, including entrance locations and connecting passageways to other stations

Unknown said...

Thanks for the comment! Your suggestion has been on my wish-list for quite some time, but there are some technical, data quality, and visual display issues that need overcoming before such a thing can be rolled out globally. We'll get there though :-)