Google Maps
March 2022
I’ve been a longtime user of Google Maps and when it came time to work on my Designlab capstone projects, I gravitated towards working with Maps.
My favorite feature on Google Maps is saved places. I have a ton of my favorite New York restaurants saved, and many more that I’ve heard or read about.
I had wanted to add collaboration features so that people could save places to the same lists, but wanted to conduct user interviews first to know whether or not that would solve the problems of other users. I ended up finding out that users had that problem but they also had a different one…
Team
Ivan Jacobson - UX Researcher, UX Designer, and UI Designer
Research Results
I interviewed four Google Maps users who use the Saved Places feature. These interviews clarified the problems users were facing and showed me that the main problem users had was that their lists of saved places were completely disorganized. I found that users had two more problems related to the saved places feature: users feel that the sharing options are insufficient and users forget about the saved place feature.
Users save places quickly after reading about them, hearing about them through word of mouth, or passing them by on the street, and don’t spend time organizing their lists. Users tend to only use Google Maps’ default lists: ‘Starred’, ‘Favorites’, and ‘Want to Go’. They see these lists as interchangeable and above all, they save places to the ‘Want to Go’ list.
Users don’t use the current sharing options because they are hard to find or insufficient to accomplish their task. Instead, users find workarounds. They either text people a place’s name and hope that the other person finds the right place, share a screenshot for ease despite its lack of interactivity, or email another user a list of places because they don’t know the other user’s phone number.
Additionally, users can forget about the entire saved places feature because it isn’t centrally located within the app’s interface.
User Narratives
To better understand users, empathize with their problems, and ideate on possible solutions, I wrote two user narratives. One explains the situation as-is and the other explains what the user’s experience would be if my proposed solution is implemented. The new user narrative was a living document that was updated as my design progressed.
Existing User Narrative
Sarah is walking down the street and passes Roberta's. She’s always wanted to go there so she saves it to her lengthy ‘Want to Go’ list. James tells Sarah that Kelly and him are going on a trip to New York and asks her for her recommendations of places to go. Sarah texts him the names of five places, including Roberta's. James searches for them on Google Maps and saves them to his list ‘New York Trip’. Kelly looks up places to go and texts three places to James through text via Google Maps’ share sheet. James opens the links in his texts from Kelly and saves the places to ‘New York Trip’. Adding the places Sarah and Kelly sent him reminds James of a place he read about, so he saves it to the trip list too.
New User Narrative
Sarah is walking down the street and passes Roberta’s. She’s always wanted to go there so she takes out her iPhone, finds Roberta’s on Google Maps, and with two taps, Quick Saves the restaurant. Google Maps saves Roberta’s and automatically sorts the restaurant into Sarah’s ‘Pizza’, ‘Williamsburg’, and ‘New York City’ Smart Lists. Sarah receives a snackbar notification telling her that Roberta’s was saved to those Smart Lists. James tells Sarah that Kelly and him are going on a trip to New York and asks her for her recommendations of places to go. He then sends Sarah an invite to his shared list, ‘New York Trip’, that Kelly has already joined. Sarah adds five places to the list, including Roberta's. Kelly looks up places to go and adds three places to the list. James receives notifications that Sarah and Kelly added places to the list and that reminds him of a place he read about, so he saves it to the list too.
Quick Save
Quick Save was inspired by the research I did showing that users tended to only use Google Maps’ default lists, saw the lists as interchangeable, and that above all, they save places to their ‘Want to Go’ list. That gave me the idea first to consolidate the lists, but then to replace them with automatically sorted lists. If it didn’t matter to users what list they saved the place to, then I should streamline the process and have them save from the place page, without having to scroll.
Quick save allows users to save places faster than ever. By tapping on the floating action button and then tapping on “Quick Save”, users can easily save any place to automatically sorted smart lists.
When as I was contemplating how to solve this problem, I was reading Google’s Material Design Guidelines. I was also looking at the other Google products I use, Google Docs in particular. In Google Docs, you tap a floating action button to create a new document. That experience, along with my reading, made me realize that a floating action button appearing on a place’s page would make it faster to save a place and would make the feature much more prominent in the UI - solving the issue of users forgetting about the feature. That’s when it hit me - users could save a place by tapping on a floating action button and then tapping “Quick Save” from its speed dial.
Smart Lists
Users don’t have the time to organize their lists of saved places and they quickly get cluttered. When they go into their lists to find a specific restaurant, they don’t have a way to sort them and they have to scroll past museums, bars, coffee shops, other restaurants, and every other kind of place that they’ve saved, which is a frustrating process.
This frustration inspired Smart Lists, a feature that works hand-in-hand with Quick Save to automatically save places to separate lists based on those categories. Places are saved to nesting lists based first on city, then neighborhood, cuisine, and category.
Collaboration Features
I wanted to respond to the last pain point users (and I) had: that the collaboration features in Maps were lacking. I drew inspiration from the create new document dialogue in Google Docs to design a create new list dialogue for Google Maps. On the first step users name the new list and can tap a button to share it. On the next step, users enter the emails of the other people they want to collaborate with and enter an optional message to send them.
I conducted remote, unmoderated testing using the Maze usability testing platform. A high-fidelity Figma prototype was used for testing. Nine testers completed three missions and answered two questions regarding the new features. Each tester was a Google Maps user who frequently saves places, the same criteria used in selecting participants in the initial user research. Before conducting testing I hypothesized three outcomes:
The new Quick Save feature will enable users to save places faster.
The new Smart List feature will make users more organized and allow them to find saved places more easily.
Streamlining the list creation and sharing feature will make it easier and faster for users to make and share lists.
Because of these improvements, I believed that users will prefer to use Quick Save and Smart Lists over the current save experience and will prefer to use the streamlined list creation and sharing feature over the current one.
The test followed a narrative based on the new user narrative. The first task asked the user to test the new Quick Save feature by Quick Saving Roberta’s. The second task asked the user to test the new Smart List feature by navigating to Roberta’s in their saved tab by opening a smart list. After the testers completed the first two tasks, they were asked if they preferred the new Quick Save and Smart List features to the existing saving and list management features. The third task asked the user to test the streamlined list creation and saving feature by saving Roberta’s to a new custom list, then sharing the list with an added message. The second question asked testers if they preferred the streamlined list creation and sharing feature or the existing feature.
My hypothesis was proved correct:
Testers found that they liked to be able to quickly and easily save a place without a second thought.
Testers liked that Smart Lists does the sorting for them and found that having places already categorized allowed them to find saved places more easily and intuitively.
Testers thought that the streamlined list creation and sharing feature felt faster and more intuitive.
The design has good learnability, users did not have difficulty figuring out how to use the Quick Save feature.
The design has good memorability, when the testers began the list creation and sharing task they remembered exactly where to go to save a place to a list.
89% of testers preferred the new features over the current ones.
At the end of the day, I found that other users wanted the collaboration features I did and discovered that users had problems I had no idea about. I feel that I solved the problems and I wish that Google Maps had these new features.