Google Maps - Analysis and evaluation

How can you use Google Maps?

Search - Search for a place by it’s name and Google Maps will drop a pin at your place on a map. You are also able to search on hotels, restaurants, companies and so on.

Views - You can choose by four different views:

Map: an original map.

Satellite: a satellite map showing in detail a real picture map.

Earth: using google earth.

Streetview: you are able to get a street view where you can “walk around” and explore.

Directions - If you’re going somewhere and you need a guide on which specific route you should take.  You can choose between different transportation like “Car”, “Public transport”,  “By Walk” and “By bicycle”. Then you’ll get different routes and the calculated time will be different.

My Places - You can save places you’ve been to or your home address to find easy access in searching, while getting driving directions or when to find them on the map.

Print/Send - You can print a map or send to another person by email.

Share - You can get a link to your map to share with others.

Layers - If you have a map of a city, you can add a “map-layer” showing traffic, pictures and so on.

Pros with Google Maps

+  By GPS Google Maps find your location

+ If you are lost and you have internet connection or without internet connection but you know your location, Google Maps can find your way back (only if you know where you’re going).

+ If you are wondering how a city really look like you can use streetview to explore.

+ It’s quite easy to use and understand.

+ It’s free to use.

+ If you already have a downloaded map on your smartphone you can guide yourself using that map without internet connection.

Cons with Google Maps

- If you want to use Google Maps you need a computer, smart phone or other devices with  internet connection to download the maps and search for places.

- If you don’t know where you are and you don’t have internet connection it can be tricky to find your location using Google Maps.

- It’s not  100% reliable, every street is not in the system. My street for example doesn’t exists on google Maps so you can’t find my adress.

- The streetviews are sometimes in smaller cities or in poor countries very bad, and not updated for that matters.

- There is a lot of new build houses, that doesn’t exists on the maps.

- If you want to use the view “Earth” you need to download the Google Earth application.

Think aloud evaluation

Conditions: I did this think aloud evaluation with a Student from KTH. Later on it turned out that she works with maps and GPS.

Task 1 : Find Nymble and show the building. You want to know how the front door looks like.

The map showed the lower part of sweden at the beginning. At first she zoomed in on Stockholm by scrolling the mouse. Then she clicked and draged the map to get the right view. She already knew KTH campus location so she continued zoom in and draged the map so KTH always stayd in center of the window. When she thougt she had a perfect overview she said. “ I guess Nymble should be placed at this road but i don’t know which house it is”. Then she pressed on the little small yellow man in the left upper corner of the map because she thought it was “Streetview”. She dragged and dropped the man on the map in the specific road she thought Nymble was at. She clicked her way forward to see the building and the she found the door. There was no mistakes during this first task. It seemed like she knew what she was doing.

Task 2: Get the direction from Nymble to your Home.

She pressed the button “vägbeskrivningar”  because she thought it seemed legit. And then she said, “I want to walk home, so i press this symbol of a walking person”. Here comes the first small surprise. She pressed the round green “A” symbol and tried to drag it to the screen showing Nymble. It didn't work, she thought she could fill in the address of Nymble by dragging the the symbol to the map. "I don't know the address, how to get it?" she asked. By clicking around with the mouse suddenly the address showed in top of the window and she had the location. She reflected about Google Maps gave her wrong house number of Nymble (she all ready knew that number). She continued by typing in the start address in the first box (with the green "A" symbol). And then her home address in the other box. She had one more problem, her home address doesn't exists in Google Maps so she had to pick another close by address. And a path shows and she's happy. She reflected about the "A" and "B" symbols, " It would be easier if the symbols where different colors".