Google Maps Gets Personal:Customised Maps For Everyone

Tech giant Google wants to make maps that are tailored to a user’s specific locations and needs.

At the Roadmap 2013 conference in San Francisco, two senior designers working on Google Maps said that maps are a “canvas for the stuff we know about the world.” They plan to build as much information into Google Maps as possible, so that every map will be customised to a specific person and a specific location.

User experience designer, Jonah Jones, who works for Google said that now all of the existing paper maps have been digitalized, map designers can focus on adding more detail that customises the users’ experience based on location and other signals about the user.

To explain this in practical terms, Jones says that when a user currently zooms out on a map, the labels for locations and businesses collide resulting in Google deciding which to highlight based on which it feels is the most important. But by considering the location that the user has checked into or searched for, Google could decide more accurately which label is the most interesting or important to the user.

Bernhard Seefeld, product manager for Google Maps said in some cases it may even be that the user doesn’t need to be shown a map, that a location would actually become almost like a search query. “A map is just one way of interpreting the data” that a service knows about you, he said.

[Image via Gizmodo]

SOURCE: http://gigaom.com/2013/11/05/google-wants-to-build-maps-that-customize-themselves-based-on-what-they-know-about-you/