A few months ago I wrote a little rant about how none of the map websites accepted a single paste a of multi-line address, and how lame that was. I followed up with writing my own little hack to make it possible with Google Maps and Yahoo Maps.

Shortly after writing these blog posts, I was asked to do a User Interface presentation at one of the major search/maps companies in Sillicon Valley Read the rest of this entry

I was recently invited to one of Silicon Valley’s big search/map companies to do a UI presentation, where I demonstrated the simplicity of my multi-line map tool UI solution.

The multi-line mapper is so trivial design-wise that at first glance it appears as though it shouldn’t even be considered UI design, much less highlighted in a User Interface presentation. However, that’s the beauty of it, and the beauty of user interface design in general; that something like this eluded all the major map sites since they’ve existed, and the key to solving it was simply reconizing the problem existed.

Hopefully we’ll see multi-line input implemented in at least one of the big map sites before too long, but only time will tell. And if you work for a map site and you didn’t see my presentation recently, I am still available.

Almost immediately after posting my blog about Google Maps and Yahoo Maps lack of multi-line address input I had an idea to write a quick little tool that will take a multi-line address and pass it on to Google Maps or Yahoo Maps Beta , formatted correctly of course.

Here it is:
Multi-line Input for Google Maps and Yahoo Maps

This little tool fixes a bit of Bad User Interface in those mapping sevices.

Google and Yahoo: See, that wasn’t so hard was it?

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.