Urban Mapping and the role of Design in Mapping

One of the benefits of organizing a conference is that I get to speak to a lot of interesting people. I just got off the phone with Ian White of Urban Mapping. You know those hideous kid toys that show a slightly different picture depending on the angle you’re looking at them (the poor man’s hologram)? Ian has finally found a use for that technology: maps.

With the multilayer image approach, he can build physical artifacts corresponding to the multilayer maps you build with GIS. For example, he’s currently aiming at tourists and locals who want a useful high-end map of a city: they get coffee shops and subway stations, but not parking places and hotels (most visitors already have a hotel booked and don’t use rental cars in urban environments; most residents don’t need hotels or want cars).

We had a great yarn about what makes maps useful, the role of the designer, and the value of neighbourhood knowledge. For example, if you can capture on a map the qualitative differences between blocks in a city, then you can help people orient themselves, work out where they want to be, and how to get there, without needing to instruct them on the complex city-specific math to turn a street address into a cross-street.

The role of designers in maps and location applications is something I haven’t heard a lot of talk about. I know that one reason Google Maps took off whas not just the Ajax interface, it was that it was visually appealing–it looks good. It seems weird that we have hundreds of years experience in creating beautiful and useful maps, yet the best we can do on the Internet is a 400×400 earth-toned cluttered GIF. I’m glad Google shook the Internet map world up a bit. I hope the design innovation doesn’t stop there.

There are still plenty of room for improvement in the user experience around online mapping. For example, Google Maps has three modes: maps, local search, and directions. I keep running into the limitations of this modal interface. For example, I’m going to WWDC in San Francisco next week. I am sharing a room at the Argent Hotel. So I search for “argent hotel, san francisco” and find my hotel. Now I want to know how to get to the Moscone Center. The pop-up for my hotel helpfully has “directions to/from this address” but I can’t just type “moscone center, san francisco” into the form. It wants a well-formed address. That means I have to push the hotel onto my stack, find the well-formed address of the Moscone Center, then return to the hotel and feed it into the directions interface.

Yahoo! Maps supports saving locations, which makes the pushing and popping easier. But no site does it all. This is just one example of the kinds of improvements to be made. At the moment there’s a lot of different functionality, but nobody’s managed to integrate it all into a single search-box. There are still different tabs, modes, or (sometimes) sites. The more the internet mapping portals study the users, the better the interfaces will become.

Ian also had great insights about neighbourhoods. He says his business is really in understanding neighbourhoods and the locations that city-dwellers think in terms of, rather than zipcodes. Finding a coffeeshop in Soho is a different matter from finding a coffeeshop in a particular zipcode. He knows the neighbourhoods and tries to represent them on maps in useful ways, but he says that he really has a data business–the output just happens to be paper. Neighbourhoods aren’t well-defined–they’re the consensus of inhabitants, generally not defined by political bodies.

Talking of neighbourhoods makes me think of Up My Street. It’s a brilliant innovation that I can’t believe we haven’t seen in the US: organize the information through the lens of a neighbourhood. You give your postcode and it’ll find a lot of different information about that postcode: schools, crime, transport, local government (UK postcodes are very fine-grained, unlike US zipcodes). Rather than existing in a contextual void, as local search engines like Google Local and Yahoo! Local do, Up My Street grounds it in the reality of life in a particular place. You can do local searches (their home page has the example of finding a plumber near you), which obviously grounds it in where you live. I love it.