Hot answers tagged maps
72
People who turn on the TV on election night expect to see the map of their country and see which states voted which way. Those who actually follow the elections and have at least some very basic knowledge of what's going on, also know which are the important states to watch, and they can find them easily on the geographic map. Even those who aren't that ...
28
Interesting graphic - the US looks quite funny. But I think a geographic representation is still best way because of:
The viewer is interested in what state has elected and which party. This is best shown in a geographical correct map as you are used to know where a state is situated.
It is obvious, that the USA is shown. No need for explaining a strange ...
22
The point is that the map is intended as an at-a-glance throwaway space filler that does it's job simply and efficiently and for all viewers.
Of course, that's not to say there's no place for maps with more information, but there's no point in doing that unless you can provide a way for the user to interact with the map in a meaningful manner that allows ...
5
The best map I have seen is by Chris Howard. It combines population density and partisan lean using color:
4
You have to chose between two User Experience options: speed vs. feature. As it happens I'm in the current situation as well at work. We have a landing page with a lot of features, making it extremely heavy to load, and in production the infrastructure could be better.
So what do we do? Use cache as far as we can take it, reducing loading time - because the ...
3
Instead of a circle, how about highlighting the neighbourhood or the post office for a given zip code area. Another alternative (depending on the context), the (main) train station for the area.
Clustered items can be presented by a “mulitple items version” of the default marker icon and all sub-elements listed in a bubble or somewhere outside the map.
3
There is a half way house between the plain geographic map that lead's republicans to think they won (or should have won) because more of the map is red and the continuous cartogram featured in the question. This is the discontinuous cartogram where the sizes of the states is modified to represent the population (or number of electoral college votes, etc).
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3
For a number of reasons outlined by Brad Frost here I would vote for 'static, and clickable' to launch the default map app on the mobile device.
Edit to provide more detail:
Brad Frost proposes conditional loading to serve up the best map in the right context. Embed the map if the screensize is appropriate, otherwise serve up a static image which links to ...
3
I'd seriously question whether you need a precise location or not. Knowing that someone was born in say "Paris, France" would most likely be enough for almost any use.
In addition most people don't know exactly where they were born, but do know the town / city level.
If town / city is enough detail for you, then simply ask for the country they were born ...
3
In general my opinion is to not break the current pattern unless necessary. Consistency is always key. Therefore I think that if you're overriding the default scroll behavior of just panning up and down that there should be some serious thought behind it and usability testing to back it up. My thoughts would be if you're panning content in some direction ...
2
Drag-n-drop is traditionally done with left-click.
However, for you, mousedown, move, mouseup is for dragging (these are the elementary events)
Usually, click is to select a place. On Google Maps, if you click on a label, an icon or a result balloon, it select its corresponding place. On Nokia Maps, if you click on an icon or a result balloon, it selects ...
2
I find most map implementations where this is included inherently bad, and (having worked with Google Maps for five years or so) generally I regret that Google Maps introduced it.
The problem is not so much that the mousewheel controls zoom, but that it can get in the way. If you scroll down a page in such a way that a map turns up under the cursor, not ...
2
Asking for patterns and precedents to emulate is going to be quite hit and miss, because there is no universal pattern for zooming. There are many different ways of implementing this sort of behaviour, each with advantages and disadvantages for different use-cases. Without knowing what sorts of information you present, how your users expect to navigate it ...
2
Don't forget to take the location and audience into consideration.
Is the location reached from two or more popular starting points? Does your audience regularly use native map applications on their mobile device?
Precede the map with some simplified, locally relevant directions.
From the I-10 Freeway South
Take Shea Blvd. Exit
Right on ...
2
This is a tough one. Requiring the exact position where a user was born is both difficult and spooky —you might as well ask for their blood type! But for the question's sake we will asume users will be ok with getting their birth certificates and checking the hospital where they were born.
I would build a form that would go from simple to complex depending ...
1
When the people who use the site hit the home page what do they want to do?
Answering that question will help provide the answer to your question.
For example - assuming we're talking a web app here - maybe on a smartphone I don't want to see a map. Maybe I want a list of the three closes parking locations and clicking on one of those will open the native ...
1
I think it is common practice to represent a non-exact location using a circle with a radius that indicates the level of certainty you have about its location. Without making this circle seem intrusive, it can be a very light shade or an outline with a central label not unlike a map marker for an exact location (but with a different styling).
Once you have ...
1
As an alternative to clicking a map, I'd suggest that instead of a list of neighbourhoods you use a autocomplete input field.
This eliminates the problems of potentially overly long lists. Additionally, you can add really many area names, even overlapping. I.e. if someone lives in a place which could be both listed in neighbourhood a, b as well as district ...
1
In data visualization terms, you've described dynamic queries or dynamic brushing on a chloropleth map. Selection of regions on the map is supported through either a second view of the data, e.g., a table containing all countries on the map, or a set of controls. See this paper for a history of one of the more well-known examples of this UI - although this ...
1
I found a site that has a set of examples for interactive maps with region selection.
The examples are in flash, which is not ultimate, but to utilize as a selection of concepts to find a suitable interactive patterns they work great.
Disclaimer: some are very wonky and have a very unsatisfying look n' feel.
1
Nice concept. I would play with providing a color palette on the side, turning the mouse cursor into some kind of brush or color bucket (like in MS Paint) and using it to fill the countries with different colors.
You can use different tricks to make it clearer that the colors represent groups. E.g. at first you can have one color and label it "group 1", ...
1
POI Screen:
You say "Half Dome" at the top. Don't keep repeating it in your labels.
For example lets use a UX site. You wouldn't want the buttons to say:
UX Chat
UX Meta
UX About Us
UX FAQ
You can just get rid of the common word. Only use it as much as necessary. This is a usability tip I learned in Nielsen's Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed
...
1
Great Question! I think what you would like to see is a user not getting lost in a site with potentially 10 billion pages. To give you one example, the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Library uses a specific technique to ensure users not getting lost (see image). To the right I’ve highlighted certain elements which could be called breadcrumbs, but are ...
1
I find a list view with the closest locations first to be more helpful; as you can see your second example is extremely crowded (a search for McDonalds is an extreme example granted) and it is much harder to judge the distance between locations, it might involve zooming and paning around...but you can cut that all out with a list.
With the list you can also ...
1
On our mobile app the list view does better than the map view. Many people aren't map oriented and have trouble zooming in to click on a pin to figure out what it is and if they want to go there. More often people want to sort and filter their list, find a place, and then confirm the location on a map. Additionally, Map oriented people are generally more ...
1
I suppose that by "side contextual menu" you mean the regular right-click menu that appears on the side of the place you clicked.
Pie menus are nice, except that they don't work very well with text. Most good implementations of pie menus just contain icons. I've seen some with text-only items, but they very rarely look good. And I don't think I ever saw one ...
1
The examples produced by Walrus are simply stunning.
Walrus is the best I have seen for handling very large trees. It would also be hopelessly slow for what you want to do interactively, and besides is not a web app, but it could provide the 'top level' as canned images. Then when you get down to subsets you can use an interactive method.
3D is just ...
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