{"id":1673,"date":"2011-09-07T20:48:07","date_gmt":"2011-09-07T19:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=1673"},"modified":"2011-09-07T20:50:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-07T19:50:00","slug":"google-street-view-on-iphone-a-lesson-in-ux-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2011\/09\/07\/google-street-view-on-iphone-a-lesson-in-ux-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Street-View on iPhone: a lesson in UX design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I finally discovered that the iPhone has StreetView.<\/p>\n

That means it’s only taken me THREE YEARS to find this secret feature that Google has worked very hard to make sure no-one ever uses.<\/p>\n

The best bit? The top two Google results for “iPhone Streetview” were both incorrect, and useless – but claimed to “solve” the problem (one of them was a Yahoo answer, the other a blog).<\/p>\n

Eventually, courtesy of this amusingly-titled (yet poor in terms of Google hits) blog post<\/a>, I found the solution:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. There MUST be a pin on screen – either because:\n
      \n
    1. you did a search for a place, and Google has found it and created a pin\n
    2. you tapped the curled paper in bottom right, then pressed the “drop a pin” button (incidentally: instead of letting you “drop a pin”, that button arbitrarily sticks a non-moveable pin in the center of the (now-hidden) screen. Terrible UX and GUI design. Google’s designers: what were you thinking?)\n<\/ol>\n
    3. The popup that’s attached to the pin has a standard button, and a standard icon – BUT THAT ICON IS NOT AN ICON\n
        \n
      1. …it’s an invisible button…\n<\/ol>\n<\/ol>\n

        When we’re building iPhone apps for clients, this comes up typically once on every project: if you want to do custom user-interfaces, do NOT make them look like Apple standard interfaces. Apple has trained 200 million (total number of i* devices) to expect that (in this case: ) “a map-popup has exactly one button”. You are fighting against the work of one of the richest companies on the planet, a company famous for its marketing, interface-design, and visual-obsessions.<\/p>\n

        Worse is if you then go and break all the standards on what a “button” should look like, so that (in Google’s case), they:<\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Put something in the place that is reserved for a non-clickable icon\n
        2. Used an icon-image instead of a button-image\n
        3. Provided no other ways of triggering the feature…even though this is usually NOT the place the user would want to click to get that feature\n<\/ol>\n

          I laughed out loud when I discovered this – 3 years it’s taken me to get this to work, and me a professional iPhone developer too! How long is it taking the average “normal” user? If nothing else had convinced me Google is fundamentally f***ed by their refusal to design for anything other than “engineers who are exactly like us (and the rest of you plebs don’t matter)”, this would have nailed it for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

          Today I finally discovered that the iPhone has StreetView. That means it’s only taken me THREE YEARS to find this secret feature that Google has worked very hard to make sure no-one ever uses. The best bit? The top two Google results for “iPhone Streetview” were both incorrect, and useless – but claimed to “solve” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,30,22,64,51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1673"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1673\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}