Top questions on the new maps.ovi.com

Hello everyone, it is me, Surya again. Last week, we have posted an update on the new maps.ovi.com website, and asked you guys for your feedback on the browsing experience. You responded and raised many good points, all of which were read by Will, the product owner of maps.ovi.com. Here, ...

Hello everyone, it is me, Surya again. Last week, we have posted an update on the new maps.ovi.com website, and asked you guys for your feedback on the browsing experience. You responded and raised many good points, all of which were read by Will, the product owner of maps.ovi.com. Here, Will answers some of the questions that you raised on the blog.

Comment: maps.ovi.com is still very clunky and slow when managing favorites. There is no multiple selection and fast way to delete several favorites at once. The site’s Favorites javascript keeps crashing on IE8.
Will: We are working on improvements to favorite management, including the ability to organize your Favourites into Collections, share whole collections, and some other stability/performance improvements. We will bring out the improvements next year.

Comment: Liking the new maps, but how about satellite images at street level or the ability to search from URL?
Will: Our satellite coverage varies from region to region. In most areas of the US for example we are already able to show quite high resolution satellite imagery. We are constantly working on improving our coverage, so expect this to get continually better over 2011.

Comment: You still need to deal somehow with multiple points pointing to the same place.
Will: We are aware that we have a number of duplicate places in our database, and we are working hard to eradicate all of them. In the meantime, everyone can help make the results and places better by reporting duplicates to us. Anyone can report a place as a duplicate (as well as report other problems with the place, such as missing or incorrect information) by clicking on the Report this place link on the place’s detailed view page.

Comment: When you open maps.ovi.com, the default zoom and pan signs are really small and not eye-catching and also the color selection is not eye-catching.
Will: We tried to intentionally make the map controls as unobtrusive as possible, as we want to devote as much screen real estate as possible to the map.  We also believe that map controls are a support function, as opposed to a central use case, which is the map and it’s ability to chart your routes. As you can see here, here is the map page

and here are the same controls.

Comment: The circular mark on top of pan and zoom bars is enabling your current location. This should be turned ON by default. Also, there is a bug that I cannot then turn off show current position once enabled.
Will: After long consideration, we decided to disable the locate me feature by default, until the user has activated it. The reason is that the web browser will always pop up a browser notification to ask if you wish to allow the website to use your current location (which is an extremely important security feature). We didn’t want the user’s first opening experience on maps.ovi.com to be a browser warning, as this feels very spammy and it’s something that nobody trusts – so we chose to make the user actively select to show their current location before activating it. The user can then choose in My preferences > Always use current location, and then the map will always open at their current location.

Comment: The color combination of your Ovi and Navteq logo at the bottom is such that sometimes it is hardly visible on map background. I think you want your logo to be at least more visible than current, but also not eye-hurting.
Will: Our focus here was not to distract you from the map experience.

Comment: When I have selected my distance unit as miles. The directions still show small steps in yards, however, the scale on the bottom right is in ft. I personally prefer ft than yards, and I believe most of the Americans will prefer ft. If not, then at least try to match the scale and the directions unit depending on one’s zoom level on the map.
Will: Good point – and we’ve received this feedback before. We might make some changes here.

Comment: The basic search functionality is still quite lagging. If I enter the correct address, but if I entered a wrong zip code by mistake, it does not show the results at all. I assume for such an imp. app, the search should be smarter than this and at-least guess the best results.
Will: Search is something that we are continually working on improving. A search experience can never be good enough!

Comment: A big deal-breaker is the absence of POI on this online map, when we have POI on mobile maps. POI is such an important feature that you have decided to omit for such a long time.
Will: We’re working hard on bringing POIs to our map canvas. Stay tuned – we already have public transport lines on this version of maps.

Comment: Once, I got into My Preference section, I cannot go back to the map window by hitting back button on the browser. Can go back by clicking on preferences again.
Will: We plan to make some changes to how our application deals with the browser back and forward buttons.

Comment: When I calculate any directions, there is no obvious marker on the entire window that tells me how I can sync those directions with my phone? I think this should be easily visible on the map window.
Will: This is a good point. At the moment, to get your Route to your phone you need to save it as a favourite. When your Favourites are synchronized to your phone, your route will appear. Good point though, we could make this a bit more obvious…

Will would also like to remind you that we do read all your feedback, even if we do not always respond to it. He promises to incorporate some of your suggestions for the next release of maps.ovi.com. Thank you guys for your comments and feedback!

Source : http://blog.ovi.com/2010/12/15/top-questions-on-th...