Bad User Interface: Yahoo Maps, Google Maps

Nov-21-05, 1:59 am by Hanford
File under: maps, Google, Yahoo, web2.0, Bad User Interface

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.

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Urs Widmer wrote: Mar-10-08, 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?

Jimmy wrote: Dec-12-06, 4:58 am

Brian is correct, after a very long time Google has added support. Firefox is working fine.

Brian wrote: Jul-28-06, 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

Kelvin wrote: Apr-2-06, 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?

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » I’m not the only annoyed one. wrote: Mar-5-06, 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. [...]

Jared wrote: Nov-22-05, 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!

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