Behind Google Maps’ Intuitive
New Design
HOW DO YOU REDESIGN THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR MAPPING SERVICE
WITH THE DEVICES OF THE FUTURE IN MIND? YOU THROW EVERYTHING OUT
AND START FROM SCRATCH.
John Brownlee
First launched in 2005, Google Maps has helped hundreds of millions of people plot billions of trips worldwide. It’s one of
the most indispensable Internet services available: more than 54% of all smartphone owners in the world use it at least once
a month.
So how do you redesign Maps for the next decade, those next billion trips? You throw everything out and redesign it from the
ground up with the future in mind--and not just the future of smartphones and tablets, but also the future of Google Glass, the
iWatch, and self-driving cars.
THE OLD MAPS WAS A LOT LIKE
A CHRISTMAS TREE. WE KEPT
ADDING THESE BEAUTIFUL
NEW ORNAMENTS, BUT OVER
THE YEARS, THE ORNAMENTS
STARTED
WEIGHING
THE
TREE DOWN.
The new Google Maps sees a redesign of Pegman, the
Street View mascot. His animations now show him dangling
his limbs when you “drive” around.
Currently rolling out to all users internationally, Google’s new Maps design is a radical overhaul of the service that most of
us have grown familiar with over the years. Featuring a minimalist UI based off of Chrome, it’s faster, more responsive, more
personalized, and more integrated with related Maps services like Google Earth than ever before.
“The old Maps was a lot like a Christmas tree,” says Jonah Jones, lead designer for Google Maps. “We kept on adding these
beautiful new ornaments, but over the years, the ornaments started weighing the tree down, and it became hard to find the one
you were looking for.” The accumulated cruft of almost a decade of development had resulted in a design that was cluttered
and obtuse, with countless Google services layered over one another. This made features hard to discover, unless you already
knew they were there.
For the update, Google wanted to take a step back and redesign Google Maps from scratch to accommodate the feature set it
had built up over the years. Not only did it need to seamlessly integrate Google’s many mapping services such as Google Earth
and Street Views, but it also needed to provide as future-proof of a base as possible to build out Maps for the next decade.