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Google My Maps

Implementing a new feature using existing interface and interaction designs.

Contributions

  • Interface design
  • Interaction design
  • Exploratory research
  • Prototyping

Project Type

  • School project

Time

  • 3 weeks

Tools

  • Figma

Overview

Introduction

This project is a 3-week school project that focus on creating a new feature for Google My Maps by examining existing interface , interaction patterns, features and users.

Application

Google My Maps

Only available on Android

Purpose

Create and edit custom maps that is viewable on Google Maps

Current Features

  • Create new maps or edit any that were created on the web or on another device
  • Search for places and save them to your map
  • Add a point at your current location or anywhere else in the world
  • Get directions and navigate to any saved place on your map

Problem

Travellers who use Google My Maps as their main application for creating travel routes and locations are unable to document their trip.

Design Space

How might we integrate travel journaling and capturing memories into Google My Maps?

Exploratory Research

Existing Patterns

Interface Patterns

Interaction Patterns

User Research

Intended Users

  • Traveller
  • Blogger
  • Planner

User Interview

Three different interviews were conducted with intermediate users

Appreciations
  • Convenient for viewing marked location
  • Easy to map out different places which is good for travel planning
  • Convenient for making slight changes on the go
Fustrations
  • Cannot change place marker colours
  • Cannot create routes
  • Difficult to research places compared to web applications
  • Does not show adress of new point created on mobile app

User Review

Since this application is only available on android, I was limited by the quantity of research and had to resort to user reviews on the Play Store.

I learned that majority of users were either unaware that the Google My Maps application existed or that My Maps is fully leaveraged only when it is used with Google Maps. Many users were fustrated about existing features on the mobile application.

New features

To narrow the scope on a new feature, I first looked at topics that I were relevant to travelers and proceeded to eliminate options given the different criterias.

1. I looked through journals and blogs to find common actions that travelers do or want to know about when they travel.

Journal and Blog References
  • https://www.statista.com/statistics/865413/most-popular-us-mapping-apps-ranked-by-audience/
  • https://www.gadventures.com/blog/10-things-you-should-do-everytime-you-travel/
  • https://theculturetrip.com/europe/articles/11-things-you-must-always-do-when-traveling/
  • https://www.thattravelblog.com/blog/things-you-should-do-every-time-you-travel/

Topics:

  • Festivals and holidays
  • Weather
  • Local currency
  • Accommodations
  • Make friends with locals
  • Public transportation
  • Capture memories
  • Trip journal
  • Local foods

2. As Google My Maps is a supporting application of Google Maps, I had to avoid redundant features. I began to eliminate topics that already existed in Google Maps would not add value to Google My Maps.

Transportation, food and accomodation found using Google Maps

Topics:

  • Festivals and holidays
  • Weather
  • Local currency
  • Accommodations
  • Make friends with locals
  • Public transportation
  • Capture memories
  • Trip journal
  • Local foods

3. With the purpose of the app focused on travelers who have already planned out majority of their trip and is on-the-road headed to their next location, any interaction with the app is mainly used to view or add information. I eliminated a few more option.

Topics:

  • Festivals and holidays
  • Weather
  • Local currency
  • Accommodations
  • Make friends with locals
  • Public transportation
  • Capture memories
  • Trip journal
  • Local foods

Journal Apps

Day One

A leading journaling app that can be used for daily life, speicifc events, or trips. Some features include inputing temperature, weather, moon phase, and altitude. One of the key features is the ability to view previous entries through calendar, timeline, or photos.

Task: Create a Journal Entry

Polarsteps

An easy to use travel log that automatically plots your journey on the map according to the location of the photos that you have taken. This application is great for adding simple notes along with your pictures.

Task: Create a Journal Entry

New Feature on Google My Maps

Feature: Travel Journal Entries

Application

Goal

Capture memories and document important information that can be refered back to after the trip.

Use

This feature allow users to create journal entries at their desired location.

Importance

  • Increase in demand for travels and tourism across the word with 1.46 billion international tourist arrivals in 2019.
  • Available on existing app: Day One and Polarsteps
  • Humans like to document
  • Benefits of travel journaling:
    • Gather information
    • Organize thoughts
    • Time passer
    • Personal souviner
    • Create rich memories

User Persona

Goal

Sam arrives at Victoria and is feeling very excited about the beautiful weather and want to documents her emotions. Before she heads on the road to her next destination, Sam wants to use the new journal feature on My Maps to

  1. Create a journal entry
  2. upload a photos
  3. and add a tag

Needs

Sam is an avid traveler that wants to document her travels. Through this new feature Sam can gather information at each location to build stronger memories.

Design Changes

While I did maintain most of the previous design patterns from Google My maps, I made some minor changes to a couple heuristic problems (based on Nielsen Norman Group's 10 usability heuristics for user interface design) that I found in the application.

Original popup
New popup

Change #1 - Popup

The old popup has text orphans which can cause uncomfortable reading and visual imbalance to the user. To avoid the problem, I increased the line width so that all of the text appeared in one line.

Original buttons
New buttons

Change #2 - Cancel button in the tags popup

The original 'Cancel' button had the same visual design as the 'OK' button, however in the new interface the 'Cancel' button is visually different. This difference allows the primary action 'save' to have stronger visual weight.

Scenario

Creating a journal entry
Adding a photo to the journal entry
Adding a tag to the journal entry
View prototype →

Reflection

After this project, I had realized the importance of understanding the relevant users of an application before delving into problem idenfitication. In the beginning, my research was based around applications available in the App stpre because I personally used an Apple device. It was not until the end of my research, I stumbled upon an old blog post that mentioned the Google My Maps application in the playstore, that led to duplicate propsed design solutions. This was a lesson learned to not forget about android users as well as becoming aware of research biases.

Questions and problems that remains in my head are, why does this application not exist for iOS users? How can designers build a better usability connection between Google Maps and Google My Maps?