Bad User Interface: Yahoo Maps, Google Maps
For years and years and years, I’ve written addresess like this:
Mr. and Mrs. Fakeperson
123 Fake Street
Monolux, California 92001
See that? It’s on three lines. The address itself is on two. That’s how we were all taught to do it in school. It’s often how addresses are written in emails, and websites, on envelopes, and on the note my Dad pins to my shirt when he lets me out of the house alone.
But Google Maps and Yahoo Maps Beta both only have one address line. So If I get a two-line address in an email and I try to paste it into one of these map sites it fails miserably. The frustrating thing about it is that wanting to map a two line address seems like an extremely common use case. In fact in my life it’s more common than having a single line address.
When you paste a two-line address into Google Maps, only the first line survives. So you have to go back and copy the second line, return to Google Maps, and paste it in there, along with a comma.
The new Yahoo Maps beta pastes both lines into the field (yay!) but won’t reconize the Carriage Return, so you get a run-on sentence like this:
123 Fake StreetMonolux, California 92001
This might lull one into thinking it’s going to work, but after hitting enter it’s revealed that it doesn’t. Still, it’s significantly better than Google Maps, because all you need to do is just add in the comma. Yahoo, you’re soooooo close! Yahoo’s old UI was multiline, but instead of being one giant text field, it was multiple single-line text fields, so that didn’t work either.
I’m kind of shocked that with the new map revolution, neither of these systems are optimized for the copy/pasting of addresses. After all, the web has supported multi-line text fields for as long as I can remember. Come on Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, get with it! You’re going in the Bad User Interface section of my site until you fix this.
Quick update: I’ve created this multi-line address mapper tool to solve this problem for the time being.
I'm Hanford Lemoore. My parking skills are unparalleled.
November 22nd, 2005 at 10:56 am
Hanford, I can’t believe I missed this one. It’s such a simple and obvious fact. Thanks so much for pointing it out. I’ll be integrating this into CommunityWalk tonight!
March 5th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
[...] It must be Cranky Day today, because I’m not the only one. I forget when I started reading Hanford Lemoore (I think it was one of these posts), but he’s my favorite type of blogger: he doesn’t post that often, but when he does, the posts are insightful and original. Today Hanford posts about two potential snags in the Gmail UI: the “arrow of mystery” and editing subject lines. [...]
April 2nd, 2006 at 8:12 pm
How do you enter multiple address, say 20 at one time to have all waypoints displayed on the map? Is there a syntax or special character to separate each address?
July 28th, 2006 at 5:19 am
I think Google maps has finally added support for this (at least in IE -- doesn’t appear to be working in Firefox). They’ve done some JavaScript eventing magic to strip out carriage returns and convert them to commas.
http://maps.google.com
December 12th, 2006 at 4:58 am
Brian is correct, after a very long time Google has added support. Firefox is working fine.
March 10th, 2008 at 5:50 am
Hi
Congratulation to your solution. It matches perfect with my needs.
Question 1: May I use the sourcecode?
Question 2: If yes, why doesn’t work the code on my test-site?