Usability Quote of the Day

May 23, 2012

There's something very odd going on here. If designers made completely unrealistic assumptions about the physical world when designing technology, then we would blame them (and likely sue them) for technical incompetence. Yet when they make grossly unrealistic assumptions about human nature... we don't blame the designers, we blame the unfortunate people who are just trying to do what the design requires. -- Kim Vicente, The Human Factor, p. 45.    (via interaction-design.org)

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Comparing the Mapping Services

Online map comparison takes UI into account...

"Online mapping has come a long way in the last year. Google Maps entered the field and added satellite imagery to spring itself into the spotlight – challenging the colorful cartoon-like map images of longtime mapping frontrunner Mapquest. The Google Maps API enabled developers to create new applications and mashups, thereby pushing the Google Maps brand to mainstream audiences. Microsoft, Yahoo and others quickly followed.

As popular as Google is, it is not the most well trafficked map service. It is virtually tied with Yahoo Maps (and the new Yahoo Maps beta product which we reviewed here). Comscore says that Google Maps had 19.1 million unique visitors in March, whereas Yahoo had 20 million. Both were dwarfed by Mapquest, with a whopping 46.4 million unique visitors in March, more than Yahoo and Google combined.

In addition to Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and Mapquest, two others, Ask Maps and Microsoft Windows Live Local, also have compelling offerings.

We looked at all five of the current map services and examined their features and performance. Below is a feature by feature comparison.

The best? Yahoo Maps, for many reasons. More below."   continued ...   (Via TechCrunch)



Which map service has the best experience? - User Interface Design, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Ergonomics

Which map service has the best experience?

1 Comments:

Anonymous Michael Zuschlag said...

Typical software review. Counts the features and compares capabilities to choose a winner. Usability is all but ignored, limited to "Yahoo also has a very responsive interface... and [has a] easy send-to-mobile feature." What about overall learnability, memorability, user effort, and error avoidance and recovery?

5:43 AM  

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