That's what I remember about it too. It was such a drastic improvement over the old MapQuest site where you'd have to click arrows around the edges of the map and wait for it to load to scroll around the map. I was immediately sold on it (even though I was still just printing out directions to take with me in the car).
As an avid user of mapquest back in the day, the user experience that google provided (tiled maps that could be panned/zoomed seamlessly) was absolutely revolutionary and the clincher for me.
Mapquest back then had the clunky “click the big arrow” to move the map and reload the page navigation...
This notion always makes me laugh. Which is better, Google Maps or the old MapQuest pages that had arrows and reloaded the entire page when you wanted to move the map? I know which one I prefer.
So no Google Maps for you? I remember mapquest 20 years ago where you'd pan the map by clicking arrows and reloading the page. Good times! Usability totally won that day.
Amen. I feel like no one remembers the days of Mapquest where you'd click "next tile" and then watch the page reload just to scroll a few miles north, then repeat.
I bet you most of the users did not notice this difference. What they noticed probably is speed, and the fact that you can scroll and move around the map without clicking the side arrows (mapquest style).
This is a good point because I remember using mapquest before google maps existed. I did want real time map movement but how that mechanism was to be implemented is the key point. The inertial grab and drag seems obvious today but before that, I envisioned it working like an RTS game such as warcraft2. You'd move the mouse cursor to the edge of the map box/screen and the map would then scroll.
Technical and business limitations drove the design of MapQuest. That client computers had little computing power, bandwidth (on both sides of the pipe) was limited and expensive, and processing power on the server for a very low value user (per interaction) had to be meted. No one who used MapQuest didn't wish they could just smoothly scroll the map, but we were fine given many of us were on a terrible connection, ran on systems with limited graphics power (where even smoothly blitting a high resolution raster graphic was taxing), etc.
Every improvement (more computing power, memory, storage, bandwidth, or even business model, etc) in the industry invariably leads to many people all independently seeing the same obvious next step, many groups building the same eventual thing, and then the losers (from a market perspective) claiming that their ideas were stolen. It is the story of this industry.
The thing with Google Maps was that it was actually reasonably good and intuitive on mobile until sometime 5 or 7 years ago when someone decided it had to be "simplified".
The old version was easy: you enter "to" and "from", and it gives you a route.
I think it also had multiple entry points so you could choose "navigate", "browse" and "timeline" or something directly from the system menu.
The "simplified" version removed all that + the timeline feature I think and replaced it with one search box.
The timeline came back after a while as did a number of other features they removed but it still isn't as easy or intuitive as the early versions and it still annoys me every time I want to get a route from A to B (as opposed to from where I am now to B).
Compare this to Windows 95 that I disliked for a few months until I got used to system wide drag and drop and realized it was in fact better than Windows 3.1.
Should clarify: I have used an atlas (in fact I had one in my car in 2018 when I sold it), but internet maps have always used that interface, though I do remember that mapquest interface and the similar interface on tribalwars.net before it updated to use js and click+drag map scrolling.
Ahh this brings back so many memories I completely forgot I had. I've spent ages trying to remember where I'd seen that upturned corner navigation before the Google Maps app did it...
Oh yeah. I remember when Google Maps first came out. Nobody thought that this degree of interactivity was even feasible in a browser. It was really revolutionary.
If you have a copy of Jakob Neilsen's "Designing Web Usability" to hand there is a detailed critique of the MapQuest user interface of the time. In comparison Google Maps really was a breakthrough in usability.
The old mobile maps were frustrating to use. Very data hungry and high latency and with quirky UI bugs. It was very much a translation of the web app meant for desktop use on low latency broadband to a mobile app with only a few tweaks. For example, pinch zooming would work surprisingly, by zooming the low-res tiled image and then effectively translating into a button press to zoom in/out one level, leading to a very frustrating and clunky experience that essentially removed any advantage of using multi-touch gestures over just pressing the zoom in and zoom out buttons.
Google has not only fixed those problems, they've improved the experience several times over. It's fabulous. It's faster, it's responsive, it's seamlessly interactive, it's a pleasure to use.
reply