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Yahoo! wins in mapping user experience

Fred Oliveira on February 26, 2007

You can review mapping interfaces for as long as you want, but only when you actually need them do you get a feel for how great (or how crappy) they are. Today, Yahoo! Maps got my attention with their new mapping interface (which, I’ll admit, I hadn’t paid much attention to before).

Yahoo! Maps

First off, it is obvious that they get “flow”. Yahoo! Maps looks and acts like a RIA. It doesn’t take your input, show you results and look “static”. It allows you to interact with your routes, add nodes or traffic information dynamically and once you’ve got the perfect route or map, it gives you immediate print access.

The reason it stands out from both their old interface and the current offerings from Google and Microsoft is because it looks and acts both simple and effective. It doesn’t get in your way, it doesn’t make you “guess” what to do. When you try it out, you know what you’ll get. It feels like a desktop application.

This feeling isn’t easy to obtain with web-apps. You are operating in a clunky piece of software (the browser), using technologies that browsers often interpret in different ways. But these days, there’s a lot you can do to improve the feel of your application. Technologies like Ajax, Flex or Apollo let you get desktop-like experiences. That, and meticulously planned interaction with the page. Personally, I want to see more applications like the new Yahoo! Maps interface.

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Comments on this post

Ric

Fred - nice words, and a good review, but …. no link? I’ll have to Google ‘yahoo maps’ to find my way there!

Tijs

The interface has indeed improved in strides. Too bad they still only support useful mapping, route and sattelite date in the US though. In the end Yahoo is not the global company that Google strives to be.

Sean

I can certainly see why you like Yahoo!’s maps. Their left side system for displaying directions and location searches is very good. However, after trying it out for ~10 minutes, I think I still prefer Google Maps in terms of smoothness and speed.

I felt like Yahoo!’s interface loaded more slowly on a connection that loads Google Maps just fine. More importantly, I felt that while things were loading (expanding a direction step, for instance), sufficient feedback wasn’t given that something was going on. I thought I had broke it several times before something (a small inset map in that instance) finally popped up.

Also, I noticed that several times if I zoomed the map and then click-dragged it before the app was “ready”, the map would actually move BACK to the original zoomed position after loading the images.

Other than these few niggles (hopefully to be worked out soon), I generally liked it. Google will have to come up with something to match the whole left-side window they have going on.

Bruno Figueiredo

Yeah, it’s really nice. Kevin Cheng (from OK Cancel) is the one behind Yahoo Maps and Local and he’s really great.

I think that they main advantage over competitors is that they perform really lots and lots of user testing, which is something most web apps forget.

Even 37 Signals, on Getting Real dismisses user testing in favor of realeasing and waiting for feedback, which for anyone that ever tried user testing is just plain wrong. It baffles me every single time the amount of stuff I learn from just observing users.

Stephen Collins

I only wish this were true across all locations.

Yahoo data for both geo-information and satellite imagery for Australia is very out of date, effectively canceling out any application interface benefit they might otherwise have.
Google’s data for Australia is pretty much across the board and makes them a compelling choice in this space.

Like other commenters here, my feeling is that Yahoo has an unenviable amount of catching up to do. Perhaps they have another Yahoo text ads issue on their hands, where they’ve vastly misjudged timing and market.

Julio Garcia

I totally agree. To bad that outside the USA it doesn’t even have a good a enough image resolution, like google maps do.

ernst

What good is a flashy interface when coverage is weak, local search results spammy, and the site slow? You’ll find me at Google Maps, thanks.

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