Google Maps' New Color Scheme Draws Criticism Online (sfgate.com) 92
Google Maps has added "a fresh color scheme, including a different look for parks and city blocks," writes SFGate. "But it's the changes to the app's all-important road maps that are rankling online commentators..."
Previously, highways and freeways were depicted in bright yellow, which stood out against a stark white grid. Now, the app shows every road in various shades of gray, with major thoroughfares like Interstate 80 and Highway 1 showing up darker and thicker than other roadways. Raynell Cooper, an employee at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, called the new look "cartographically disappointing" in a Monday post to X, formerly known as Twitter. He added, "major local roads and limited-access highways (freeways) are basically indistinguishable."
TechRadar has a side-by-side comparison of the old and new color schemes, quoting one Reddit who says the new one is a bit harder to read quickly. "The toned down look is cute but not practical." And the Evening Standard shares more negative reactions, including one user who complained the new color scheme is "shockingly bad." "Hate it hate it hate it hate it. Yellow roads were so good, and everything was bright and cheery," states another person on Reddit. "Now it's depressing and the roads are hard to see when not fairly zoomed in, they just don't pop like the yellow did.
One Reddit user offered another complaint. "I think the water is a fairly significant change, it's a much closer shade to the green of the land which makes it a little harder to differentiate at a quick glance."
And another criticism came from a post on X. "15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps..." wrote designer Elizabeth Laraki. "Last week, the team dramatically changed the map's visual design. I don't love it." It feels colder, less accurate and less human. But more importantly, they missed a key opportunity to simplify and scale... Google Maps should have cleaned up the crud overlaying the map. So much stuff has accumulated on top of the map. Currently there are ~11 different elements obscuring it.
Tech blogger John Gruber writes, "This is a very long way of saying that Google Maps's app design should be like Apple Maps."
TechRadar has a side-by-side comparison of the old and new color schemes, quoting one Reddit who says the new one is a bit harder to read quickly. "The toned down look is cute but not practical." And the Evening Standard shares more negative reactions, including one user who complained the new color scheme is "shockingly bad." "Hate it hate it hate it hate it. Yellow roads were so good, and everything was bright and cheery," states another person on Reddit. "Now it's depressing and the roads are hard to see when not fairly zoomed in, they just don't pop like the yellow did.
One Reddit user offered another complaint. "I think the water is a fairly significant change, it's a much closer shade to the green of the land which makes it a little harder to differentiate at a quick glance."
And another criticism came from a post on X. "15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps..." wrote designer Elizabeth Laraki. "Last week, the team dramatically changed the map's visual design. I don't love it." It feels colder, less accurate and less human. But more importantly, they missed a key opportunity to simplify and scale... Google Maps should have cleaned up the crud overlaying the map. So much stuff has accumulated on top of the map. Currently there are ~11 different elements obscuring it.
Tech blogger John Gruber writes, "This is a very long way of saying that Google Maps's app design should be like Apple Maps."
It was bad anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
The visual design of Google map visual design is behind all competitors. OSM is the most elegant; historical mapper companies (e.g. Michelin, at least in Europe) are more legible.
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For Sweden we have the national maps available at https://minkarta.lantmateriet.... [lantmateriet.se]
Not sure if they are viewable outside Sweden.
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I can confirm they are viewable from the outside. But what I use maps for is usually navigation and it seems to lack that.
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My primary input here was graphical style, and those maps have other qualities instead like property borders.
Maybe Google makes their map harder to use because they don't want people to use them for navigation and ending up on dead end donkey tracks with their motorhomes?
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Not sure if they are viewable outside Sweden.
It is and it is a very easily viewable map.
Everyone has a different preference for map colors which is why maps from Michelin, DeLorme, and Rand McNally used to have a loyal following. Some maps were just easier for different individuals to view, whether it was text size, color codes, amount of detail, or zoomed-in street views for large cities.
Google could probably offer a color selection gadget but that would require them to assign every different type of element in their maps a category that could be as
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Which OSM? The default theme? The default theme on OpenStreetMap.org is actually quite close to the new Google one.
I find the default look of OSM isn't very good. Anything that uses tiles has an issue with high DPI displays and not being able to alter what information is displayed, it seems. The website suffers from that quite badly in busy areas. One thing it does well is showing business types with small icons, better than how Google shows them.
Apps that display using vectors like OSMand can be better, bu
Enshitify everything! (Score:2)
Enshitify everything! if its already good enough, make sure you make it worse so you can "improve" it later.
Re: Enshitify everything! (Score:5, Informative)
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Wow, you're a real gem. I wonder who or what shat you out.
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The Google map is really bad at some things - like zip code borders that are causing those living close to a border to be "unlocateable".
With the new color scheme there's no difference between forest and open land either, something that's essential for navigation in some areas. Insert "I can't see sh*t man" meme.
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Including the Evening Standard bits is pointless (Score:3)
Why bother including that Evening Standard readers aren't happy? That's pretty much a given, readers of that rag are never happy. They're like Tunbridge Wells residents in that respect, never pleased and only comment when they hate something. Including them makes it seem like a non-story. A few Reddit users weren't happy but they couldn't really find enough to make a story out of, so they looked somewhere they were guaranteed to find more unhappy people. In other news, water is wet.
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For the most part judging a change based on negative comments is in and of itself a pointless experience in general. People only talk about what they hate. The world is short on time, short on attention span. You don't get people jumping up and down talking about everything they see and like.
I remember reading a marketing psychology papers from a few years back, when I went through my degree we learned that for every 1 happy customer who talks about your product, 10 unhappy customers will. That was 20 years
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Good point. But then the question is for whose satisfaction or for what purpose did they change the colour scheme? Did people complain. Does the new scheme give new benefits?
I for one, don't like the new scheme - the selected route colour and the other road colours are all blue and hard to distinguish quickly - Need to stare at the screen carefully to decide at road turnings.
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Well there's another psychological factor coming into play and also one UI related one.
The psychological factor is one of chasing trends. Unchanging interfaces can quickly be considered "old" or "out of date" by the general customer population, regardless of whether it was functional prior or not.
And the other is one of only talking about what you hate. The UI change significantly, not just the colour scheme, but the actual presentation of information in Google Maps has changed too. Traffic lines are now fa
Hmm It couldn't be so bad (Score:4, Funny)
People tend to overreact everything nowadays.
(opens Google Maps, almost pukes)
HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT HATE IT
Re: Hmm It couldn't be so bad (Score:2)
Part of the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Is people don't bother to take a look where they're going before setting out. They just assume the technology will get them there.
If they would view where they're going beforehand and have an idea what roads to take, the map on their phone would be a reminder, not the sole source.
That said, I checked the online version and while it has the same color scheme (obviously), it's more of a meh to me. Roads are dark (they're called blacktop for a reason), water is still blue(ish), parks are green. One thing I did notice is certain communities now have names attached to them whereas before there was no designation.
Bitch all you want, but we know Google will never take user comments under advisement. This is what you get. Deal with it.
Re:Part of the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually don't mind the redesign. Then again, I might be biased because I prefer muted color themes like "solarized light" on my editors and terminals, and this new thing is a little more similar to that.
The most important thing to me is that the street names seem to be a little easier to read. This long has been a major problem with Google Maps.
Now, what they really need to do is add a setting where by default, the map starts with NO OVERLAYS AT ALL. Unfortunately, if they ever add that, they'll probably charge a $12.99/month subscription fee for it.
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I do like that the updated version seems to scale the maps differently by default. It used to be, when I'd open the app at home, the area initially shown was so small as to be useless without resizing (minor, but annoying). Now it shows me enough info that, if I'm just driving into our nearby town, I don't have to resize the map at all.
To the GP's point - before heading somewhere, I typically do open Google Maps to get an overview of traffic along the way. But I must also confess my wife makes fun of how of
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I don't mind the new colour scheme, in fact I think it's an improvement over the old one as it reduces the contrast on less important things, making more important stuff easier to pick out.
The problem is what Google considers important. It shows random shops and other locations I'm not interested in.
I wish they would make your own saved POIs stand out a bit better. They have at least added the option to select a custom icon now, very welcome and much needed. It's just that the icons don't stand out well eno
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Is people don't bother to take a look where they're going before setting out. They just assume the technology will get them there.
Why is this a problem? Technology should exist to remove tasks we can automate. Why waste brainspace on looking and memorising a path when the technology gets you there?
That's the real issue. Does the technology not always work. I used to try and second guess Google Maps, it has almost universally lead to a worse outcome. In all my years driving I can remember only two cases where it failed to get me somewhere reasonably: once it put me on a non-existent road (I could see my destination, just couldn't get t
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Why waste brainspace on looking and memorising a path when the technology gets you there?
Did I say memorize the route? I said take a look at where you're going. It's called familiarization. Look before you leap and all that. It's always amusing how people will come up with any excuse to claim they're far too busy or have far more important things to do than perform a simple task.
So why shouldn't I blindly trust the technology?
This is why [slashdot.org].
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Why waste brainspace on looking and memorising a path when the technology gets you there?
Because my taxes and insurance go up when you drive into a lake and someone has to come rescue you. For the sake of the rest of society, take a few seconds to familiarize yourself with your route instead of blindly trusting technology, because it WILL fail you at some point.
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Mind you, I do not memorize any
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> This is what you get. Deal with it
Oh I already do. I dont use phone based maps. Too small a screen and no detail.
As A Colorblind User (Score:4, Insightful)
I like it. I also like how all the churches are grey and not that noticeable anymore. I guess it's grey, maybe it's blue. I'm sure someone will scream at me in frustration what the real color is like usual.
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I thought that was a crosshair.
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Found the ISIS acolyte!
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Yes, I watched Isis and a young lad. She was hot! Dunno what else you could be referring to. Well I do, but I don't want to come out and play right now.
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*as a young lad* -EBKAC
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Google may want to do some A B testing and check how often people crash when using the old colors on the map vs the new colors, if the new colors end up causing people to misunderstand the map or just causes people to look at the map longer because it is less readable, there may be more crashes. So if Google is going for more crashes here, they may want to keep the map that helps to produce that outcome.
They are obviously trying to maximize crashes, since the app starts with a huge slider covering up almost the whole map, and it's almost impossible to put your finger on the tiny widget to slide it off without accidentally pulling up some listing or dropping a pin. If you are stupid enough to use this while driving, by the time you've actually uncovered the map, you've traveled half a mile with your eyes off the road
Common theme across Google products (Score:3)
It feels colder, less accurate and less human
If you use Google Search, you'll feel right at home on Google Maps.
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Right. Google Maps is just a cartographic interface for Google Search. Cruft and overlaid noise is part of the search experience. Even sidebars and more space-wasters.
And it is not helpful if you're wanting driving directions. Maybe Make Maps Great Again?
Grey (Score:2)
Grey is a hot color these days. Look at pictures of any new homes or apartments and the accent colors are all grey. Same with strip malls and fast food locations. Everything new is grey. Now google is trying the retro monochrome color scheme.
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We all paid exactly this much for it: $0.00.
Get over it.
An exchange of money isn't required; I don't have to pay for something to be allowed to complain about it, or even just review it critically.
Apple Maps is now similar (Score:4, Informative)
Color trends (Score:4, Interesting)
We, the users, are not important. Color trends are just like fancy UI elements.
Haven't you seen all those sites with grayish ink on "almost white" backgrounds? They really look cool. The fact that they are hard to read is just our fault. UI style is a pure form of art!
Re:Color trends (Score:4, Funny)
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MS-Windows is the same. Buttons used to have visible borders but they removed them so now you don't know where you can click until you hover over the text. This reduces productivity because when you need to bring a window to the front, first you have to find an empty place in the window to click. This gets worse as the title bar of a window fills up. (macOS doesn't have this problem because you can safely click anywhere in the window to bring it to the front.)
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Agreed; it's bad (Score:2)
Contrast is almost comically low. They need to admit they made a mistake on the g-suite icons for mobile, too. They're hard to distinguish. What's going on over there? Aren't they supposed to have smart people working for them? What's the matter, LeetCode interviews not working like they thought?
Google continues down their path (Score:2)
Google started out providing users a service they wanted:
Fast, accurate search results without a lot of garbage
- Since then they have "improved" Google search to the point of being comparable to Bing - ie.: not very good
Fast, easy to use webmail
-since then they have improved it to the point of being crappy but usable on a computer but basically irrelevant on a cellphone screen. Outlook Mobile is better than the Gmail app.
Google Maps was something of a revelation when introduced
- since then they have filled
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There will be others who pick up the slack as Google fails.
I dunno. Their monopoly ad position gives them the power to force crud down our throats for a long, long time.
It follows the recent trend... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It follows the recent trend... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not all bad (Score:2)
I like the color of surface streets. White was really hard to see.
But things that annoy me are not being able to read the names of the streets even when you zoom in.
I'm colour blind and google went from bad to bad. (Score:2)
I'm colour blind. Not completely colour blind, but bad enough. For me, Google maps was bad before, and it's bad now.
What is that old saying - jumping out of the frying pan and landing in the fire. Yeah, that is kinda like that for me. No real change.
Skins and Options (Score:2)
Why are there no skins and options for something so important? Sounds like it would be pretty easy do to do have color pickers, at least.
And NO traffic information until much higher zoom. (Score:5, Interesting)
The terrible colour scheme change also changed when traffic information is shown - now the same zoom level shows only the major roads (two-lane), one has to go down to 200m or 100m to see the same streets as were shown already on 1km scale previously.
This requires a lot of zooming/scrolling and prevents an effective use of the information, combining traffic infor with knowledge of local roads...
THIS seems to be the real goal - remove visual clues (no more a map) and force people to rely on directions (navigation only).
I've seen the same problem with in-car Google Maps for those unfortunate manufacturers who went Android route. These maps do not show city/village names and are useless as a map. The user is basically forced to tell Google the destination and rely on the directions.
In-car HERE maps look much better - they have a useful colour-coding, show traffic data (bi-directional!) in low zoom levels already, give you village names so you know where you are.
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Don't read into silly conspiracy conclusions. The goal of the UI is obviously to indicate easily the separation between roads. Traffic is displayed more boldly and while you're right with the zoom levels, one thing that is now completely obvious is on parallel roads *which* road is now blocked whereas previously this was omitted.
You can see this even more in play when you turn on the public transit layer. Rather than draw the lines on the tracks it now draws them as separate lines which makes it look like a
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Ahh, I see now what you explained about making the traffic lines bolder! Thank you for showing that at least there is some other logic.
My goal was not outsmarting the navigation, but getting an at-glance view of the traffic situation in a known environment. I typically have two resonable paths to destinatinons within a ~10km radius. Previously I could see all of that on a single screen, so if there was anything suspicious (crash, unusual traffic configuration) it was easy to choose one path over the other.
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I just checked and local traffic information on smaller roads is shown at the 1km zoom level for me. That is, the scale display shows 1km, and the total width of the display on my vertical phone screen is about 5km across.
If you are having issues it may be due to your device reporting incorrect display scale to the OS. I have a Pixel 8 Pro with display scaling set slightly larger than default to make things a bit more readable.
On desktop it is the same, the local traffic appears at 1km zoom level, which on
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Thank you for taking time to provide me with a checkpoint.
For me the change in "show traffic" zoom level happened at the same time as the colour switch, first in desktop browsers (Firefox, Edge, Chrome, doesn't matter) then in the phone native application&browser about two weeks later. This seems too correlated and widespread (I checked with colleagues who have different computers) to suggest scaling issues, but I will read more on that. Computer is at 100% scale, phone's screen zoom is neutral (middle
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That seems about the same as what I have. Maybe my eyes are getting old, but it seems like if you had traffic on smaller roads at those zoom levels the map would become a huge mess of green and red lines.
It might also be to discourage people from using smaller roads as rat-runs. People complain when sat navs start diverting everyone down their quiet road, to avoid traffic on the main one. If that's a good thing or a bad thing probably depends if you live on such a road or not.
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It was not a mess previously, but with the change in traffic line thickness (mentioned in another reply) this would be a mess in the new UI. A trade-off the designers made...
I see your point about forcing people away from smaller roads. it is reasonable. The local roads I meant are two-lane roads that are major communication paths in my area, far from being quiet residential roads - those appear only at 20m scale.
Probably forcing all roads to a uniform system does not work. Right now highways, express roads
Is it because of Europeans? (Score:3)
Does it print well? (Score:3)
Because the "old" look was absolutely awful when printed on a black-and-white printer
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Because the "old" look was absolutely awful when printed on a black-and-white printer
This is the driving design criterion?! "We must optimize for people who print maps but don't have a color printer."
Who even prints their Google maps? And I haven't seen a black and white only printer in more than a decade.
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Oh yeah. We're not allowed by law to hold our phones in hand while driving, so we print out maps and hold a sheaf of paper to thumb through instead.
And no, I'm not serious but I'm also sure that somewhere right now there's a person trying to drive and hold a printed out map in front of them.
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Dark Mode DIsease (Score:2)
Now, the app shows every road in various shades of gray,
Somehow the tech world has become infected with the notion that dark, low contrast color schemes are super-cool! and should be used by everyone everywhere for everything! Like back in the day didn't everyone write of blackboards in various shades of grey chalk?
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Re: Dark Mode DIsease (Score:1)
Said this not more than 2 days ago myself (Score:2)
Also when plotting a route, the blue path you follow in the car, is now similar the newly changed grey road colours.
It's not identical, no, but the asphalt/ looking colour in the map for all the roads is a little bit close to the blue route, at least at a quick glance.
Why do UI people have to always fuck up what isn't broken?
I use Google maps 9.85.2 (you heard me) because it's the last known version which still gives me the fucking North GPS compass option (I NEED NEED NEED to know what direction I'm going)
Why not use, you know, map colors? (Score:2)
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> There's a reason that paper maps used the colors they did. Maybe draw some lessons from them?
"There's a reason that paper maps used the colors they *do*. Maybe draw some lessons from them?"
FTFY
If you know anything about paper maps, different mappers use their own key and colour schemes. Generally they kinda align, such as the AA road atlas uses very similar colours as an Ordinance Survey map. I've had plenty that dont. Now I standardised on having a road atlas and an OS Explorer map in the car for t
Web page maps back in the good old days (Score:2)
Years ago my employers decided we needed maps on our web-based application. Google Maps was in its infancy and didn't really have commercial terms, so we bought a mapping package (MapInfo) and figured out how to make it play with our software. The initial performance was disastrous. I figured out how to make it less disastrous.
I also spent some time designing attractive maps. I collected paper maps (I like maps anyway), picked out the ones I liked, tried to identify why I liked them. Made MapInfo draw sim
First world problems at finest (Score:1)
Did my monitor fail? (Score:2)
On my monitor it looks dim and washed out; everything is pastel and bland, with very little contrast.
What the fuck were they thinking?
Dark/Night mode? (Score:2)
As a later stage diabetic, my eyes cannot see anything with a light background. Even reading a white sheet of paper is completely impossible. I need a dark background, usually black and I even use a very large monitor with super deep blacks. Any light in the room and I'm blind.
So I really only care what the Dark / Night mode maps looks light. Even that's hard to see, so I need white on black if at where possible with good contrast and only a few areas of color and not too busy screen.
But but some puddinghead PROVED it was better (Score:1)
He got a Phd!
Graphics designers need to feel useful (Score:3)
This isn't limited to Google for sure. Microsoft seem to employ new teams for every update or iteration of their office suites for example, and their main hobby (and budget drain?) is to change the UI to waste as much real-estate as possible, for then to hide all useful functions to reclaim said real-estate.
The only justification that matters. (Score:2)
Somewhere a middle manager is sleeping well knowing that they have justified their existence.
This is why (Score:2)
I use a REAL satnav and a REAL paper map (Ordinance Survey Explorers usually).
The OS map lets me browse over the area for really interesting shit, I could use the app too, but paper!
The satnav is told what route I am intending to take, thus it is used to remind me, coupled to the phone via BT it can handle traffic changes and I can have it suggest (only suggest) alternatives.
I use Google Maps to check local traffic congestion. I find its ability to route is marginally correct but bordering on abysmal (and
Bad for a long time (Score:2)
Google maps color scheme has been bad for a long time already. The artists who get their way there just like soft pastels; you can't really see a damn thing on the map. Maybe now they are switching to watercolors, i dunno. Take a look at an old AAA or Michelin map to see how it should be done. This has been a solved problem for like 100 years.