Google Maps UX The India Conundrum

Highlights

• (View Highlight)
• Launching a product in a new region is only meaningful if it’s useful to locals. (View Highlight)
• understand 2 key questions:
  1. How did people use landmarks to navigate in India?
  2. What types of landmarks were good navigational aides? (View Highlight)
• This is where user research came in. (View Highlight)
• Olga and Janet creatively tried several different tactics to understand how locals navigated their way through India, including: • Calling businesses and asking them for directions to their stores (View Highlight)
• • Asking people to draw diagrams of routes to familiar places (View Highlight)
• Following people around as they navigated unfamiliar places (View Highlight)
• Sharing early designs of landmark based directions and asking for feedback (View Highlight)
• used landmarks to navigate in a few key ways: (View Highlight)
• Orientation: “Head towards the water” (View Highlight)
• Description of a turn: “Turn just past the Big Bazaar” (View Highlight)
• Confirmation of the right path: “You’ll see a petrol station on the right” (View Highlight)
• Error correction: “If you get to the roundabout, you’ve gone too far” (View Highlight)
• team reworked turn-by-turn street directions to include navigational landmarks to help orient people, signal turns, confirm direction, and error correct. (View Highlight)