Tech
Do you think navigation apps are stupid?
As a burger lover, I often want directions to a burger place I've never been to. Recently, the directions on my phone pointed me to an interstate onramp. The app then prompted me to merge onto the freeway 500 feet before. But what else could I have done at that point? Did the app anticipate that I might get confused and turn back?
Mapping software is great. Giving me instant access to every storefront, building, park, and transit stop on nearly every street in the world has changed my life more than any other innovation in the mobile phone era. But mapping software can also be a little weird. Seemingly random places like a bitcoin ATM or a nearby hotel you'll never stay at appear as neighborhood landmarks. And when I need directions, the app tells me things no one needs to know, like when to merge at a highway on-ramp. Why is it so confusing? Or, perhaps a better question, why does the software think I'm confusing?
Simply put, maps see the world differently than the people who use them. In the data that underpins digital maps, road networks are represented as a series of lines. Those lines have beginnings and endings. Seth Spielman, a geographer who worked for a time as a data scientist for Apple Maps, explained that drivers often get directions from the app at the transition points between those segments. When I turn onto an on-ramp and then merge onto a highway, I've passed two segments and, from the map's perspective, I need additional guidance. But I never feel the need for it. A single phrase like “get on the highway” is enough for me.
These inconsistent advice are a problem of digital maps' own making. If you started driving before the advent of GPS-enabled, app-driven smartphones, you might remember what a traditional road map looked like: Lines intersecting other lines, sometimes with abstracted freeway on-ramps and cloverleafs. You saw how the roads connected and navigated for yourself.
Maps have always been simplified, but now they're a lot less simplified than they used to be. The way the real world is represented digitally creates all these little intersections, Spielman says. This explains why digital maps tell you to stay on a straight road. When a street name changes, from the map's perspective, you've left one road and entered another. The flight computers on the plane tell you, don't do anything. Just keep going.
The likelihood of receiving such useless advice increases proportionately with the accuracy of the map. Apple and Google have surveyed the world in more detail than ever before in human history. Camera-equipped cars, and sometimes cyclists and pedestrians, have captured countless roadscapes. The dataset includes individual buildings, road lanes, turn signals, bike lanes, park paths, transit lines, and more. Apple Maps shows detailed exteriors of landmarks such as Radio City Music Hall, and in some cities, even the actual size and location of trees.
These data points make mapping apps useful, even when you're not using them for navigation. But that comprehensiveness has a downside: it leads to what's known as “map explanation.” Spielman showed me a satellite image of the intersection of Arapahoe Avenue and 28th Street in Boulder, Colorado, a regular intersection of two major thoroughfares. In the past, a map would have depicted it as two intersecting lines, and drivers arriving there wouldn't have been confused. But Apple and Google have collected enough data to describe this intersection in all its components.
The map knows that one road has five lanes and the other has six, and both have medians. It knows that a right turn between the roads is possible with a dedicated merge lane that skips the red light. It also knows that a left turn is possible on the two lanes between each of these roads, and that there is a left turn arrow signal. With all this information, the map can help provide step-by-step instructions: From northbound 28th Street, enter the first right turn lane, then make an immediate right turn into the Flatiron Coffee parking lot. While this level of precision may be convenient for some drivers, it comes at the cost of breaking up the built environment into many extra segments and transitions, and potentially showing useless routing information. Perhaps the software should just tell you to turn left past the light.
Apple Maps has tried to make its directions feel more natural, for example by using common human-sounding phrases, such as “turn left after the traffic light.” This replaces the now-familiar robotic phrases, such as “turn left in 300 yards.” Google Maps also strives to be less tortuous and verbose. The software breaks down each route into maneuvers, according to David Cronin, senior director of the Google Maps design team. It then decides which and how many maneuvers are required for drivers and pedestrians, how to explain those maneuvers, and what type of visual and auditory cues will best indicate the maneuvers. The goal, Cronin said, is to provide clear, unambiguous instructions without being too verbose.
To achieve that goal, map designers sometimes have to step in and tell the software to ignore parts of the dataset. “We recently made a change so that it won't give you directions if you need to go straight through a roundabout,” Cronin says. But in general, Maps' navigation algorithms are built to be as broadly applicable as possible. Apple handles directions differently for urban and rural roads, and highways and surface roads, but the overall approach is roughly the same across its 30 countries and regions. Cronin says Google makes small tweaks for each location, and there are always tensions to address. In India and Southeast Asia, for example, Google Maps provides different routes for motorbikes, which can navigate narrower roads than cars.
The data that makes mapping apps so powerful is always in flux, if sometimes volatile: Cronin says Google edits its maps 50 million times a day, adjusting details like how roads are classified, where traffic junctions are, which roads are closed for construction, and so on. All of these changes can affect the quality of an app's descriptions and the map's explanatory tendencies in ways that designers can't always predict.
It also decides which spots appear on the map. Both Apple and Google try to surface businesses relevant to your location. These can sometimes seem pretty random, like Lululemon or a barbecue joint. The apps rely on popularity to decide what to show, keeping track of all the spots that users tap or follow routes to most often. Spielman says that this metric meant that at one point Apple Maps defaulted to showing too many pizza places and Chinese takeout restaurants because that's where a lot of people were tapping to order food.
Google knows where you are if you give it an address, so if you're looking at a map far away, it might show you various points of interest (such as hotels). Apple avoids this use of personal information, making its search results more uniform, albeit more private. Both companies use information about how people (or at least their smartphones) move through space to help with guidance. These data could be used to assess current traffic conditions, for example. Spielman suggested that if a jogger crosses a particular road, Apple Maps could be prompted to suggest that crossing at that intersection would be more efficient than crossing elsewhere. Similarly, if someone inadvertently taps on various bars while waiting for an Uber, those bars could start popping up for others, based on the theory that they're popular.
Popularity can also build on itself. Spielman told me that tech companies sometimes buy or scrape data to get business locations. Data from chains, such as big-box stores and fast-food restaurants, tends to be easier to find and more standardized than information from smaller businesses, which gives the chains an advantage on the map. Cronin disputed this explanation. “Our goal is to create a digital representation of the real world, and the real world contains a wide variety of businesses and places,” he said, adding that local business owners and others can add places to the map. Apple also allows companies to submit their own information to the map. But once a destination becomes a place of interest, people are more likely to look up directions to it, which can reinforce the place's status. Google also places sponsored places of interest on the map. Cronin explained that they are marked with rounded squares rather than round pins, a difference I didn't notice until he pointed out.
The proliferation and widespread availability of map data may have other hidden effects, too. Cronin said Google Maps makes people more confident as they navigate the world. But Sarah Fabricant, a geographer at the University of Zurich, told me that this very confidence may be undermining humans' ability to self-localize. When the system fails, say when your cell phone shuts off or you lose signal, the impact of getting lost is more severe than it would have been before. She told me that this leads to confusion and delays, and ultimately to a loss of confidence in one's ability to navigate.
Tech companies hope that any social or cognitive shortcomings of mapping apps can be remedied by improving the features of the apps themselves. Cronin acknowledged that maps can prevent people from exploring and, as a result, from learning more about the world around them. But new technologies such as an augmented reality Street View with walking paths overlaid on it could encourage pedestrians to find their way in the real world and only check their smartphones for directions when they need to, he said. Google is also testing the idea of showing detailed previews of route endpoints, so drivers know in advance where to look for parking, for example. Cronin suggested that this approach could support spatial planning skills. Meanwhile, Apple hopes that calling out waypoints, showing users the direction to go and teaching them how to do it, could be its own form of geography education.
But new features can also breed complacency. “I think most people don't complain because they're used to the app and have accepted the way they use it,” Spielman says. Overall, there's nothing to complain about. Maps apps and the turn-by-turn directions they provide are great, and it's easy to forget their quirks. After years of being told to merge onto the highway when there's literally nothing else I can do as a driver, I finally just stopped listening. Map instructions are just part of driving, hidden in the background. Right now, I'm at the freeway entrance light. Right now, I'm turning left. Right now, I'm on the freeway. Right now, I'm on the freeway. Me and my maps app, there's nowhere I can't go.
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Sources 2/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/07/google-maps-apple-glitches/678904/ The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article |
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