I think this is great, but I can see it being potentially improved further if there was a temporary overlay of the physical map whenever you hover over a destination.
Basically, I feel that completely removing the physical map is okay until you've picked a target. Then, having to click on it to be able to see what the route looks like (which streets to take, etc.) is higher friction than I'd like. Instead, imagine if hovering would give you a route overlay, and as you hover your mouse over multiple places you're considering, you're already aware of the physical directions as well.
Having to click back and forth feels quite constraining.
This is simply feedback on a way I think it could be improved further, not to take away from how good it already is.
Location cues like "near the lake" or "near the train station" or "near the homeless camp" are critical pieces of information for me before I pick a target.
Best, although I don't really know how you'd do it computationally, would be something like a London Subway map... schematically correct but only geographically accurate in a broad sense.
I don’t think this is a transformation that can be performed by only stretching and deforming the surface (e.g., the maps of a city with time units vs distance units aren’t homomorphic).
Imagine starting on the far south end of a congested city surrounded by a circular, relatively low-traffic highway. Points on the northern end of the city would be “closer” on such a map than points directly in the center.
You could certainly define a transformation that accounts for this, but I think it would necessarily defy most people’s intuitive interpretation of such a map.
It really shines in dense urban areas like the example in Oakland CA. The route overlay would be really important if there's anything like super busy roads or no sidewalks available.
By removing literal geography, we now have a map that more closely reflects the way we think about our environment: a cluster of restaurants “five minutes that way” versus “ten minutes the other.”
Speak for yourself! I feel way more confident getting around when I know the actual geography.
As a geographer I cringed. The article was written in a way that made it sound a bit more important than it actually is, and I think that quote was one of it. A designer finding geography and cartography for the first time. It IS good stuff though. Maybe the writing is stylised and maybe not as humble as usual techy writing?
People do think about space and the environment in spatial terms and also in time. This article is basically replaying the same failure that Google is showing - that maps only have an economic value. "Pizza in San Francisco" has been a meme in geospatial hacker land for over a decade and this is another incarnation of it. People think about space in non economic terms more than in terms of how to sell stuff via advertisements. We think about safety, attractiveness, how accessible it is, whats the parking like, who we are with, where next we are going to, what is the ambiance like, how will it be when we try to get home, crime levels, any nearby arts and events on, is the football on at the stadium, is it a weekday or a weeknight, is it near a university, is it during term time, what kind of people are nearby, are the streets well lit, how noisy are the streets. etc. etc.
Now - this doesn't discount the work. I think that a 2D map - the paper analogy onto digital form also isn't good, so any research and attempt to think about what's good and working is worth looking at. Care should be taken when giving psychological or psychogeographical points to such different designs.
I don't see the article arguing that all maps should be replaced with this visualization. It's a much better map for certain tasks. Of course you lose information by throwing out geography.
I agree. I'm becoming slightly irritated by blog posts that claim something as new that appears to be either nil improvement or minor increment from what has gone before. This isn't the first or the second time I've seen it from MapBox, and I'm now sceptical of what they seem to claiming as real breakthroughs. There are thousands of researchers involved in geo worldwide - every time I dip into a journal I am humbled by the progress that is being made and the depth of the research that is being performed. Are we really to believe that MapBox are finding things that the global research community have missed? I suspect HN is a ready audience as most users do not have a formal education in geo.
Yeah. This is showy and really cool. But it seems kind of unnecessary to make it "a map"
In terms of solving real problems, I don't see it as functionally any better than a list ordered by distance with a small compass showing directionality. Basically what you see on the left when you search google maps for "pizza in san francisco".
The benefit of that list is that it uses space much more efficiently and can show things like ratings and thumbnails. Whereas in the article's ui, you have to click on every circle to see what it is.
Put another way, maps are incredibly information dense but when you remove most of the information from them, they're just dense.
One thing I immediately wondered after reading the article was: do you factor "search for parking space" in the time you calculate for driving to a place?
(I live in Europe and this is a significant concern in our densely populated urban centers).
Imo when it comes to that there is a huge difference between men and women, or perhaps more accurately people who are highly skilled in map-reading vs people who aren't.
In general men prefer to navigate using a map, cardinal directions and can adapt their routefinding on the fly (the actual geography); women prefer to navigate using turn-by-turn directions and fixed landmarks ("five minutes that way," "make the second right," etc)
I've noticed this a lot, for example when traveling in a third-world country where education is not widespread I know many people outside of cab drivers can't actually read maps. It's something we take for granted in the US. So when my friend was trying to give a local directions to a certain place by pointing to different places on a map, the local wasn't understanding. When I stepped in and provided turn by turn directions pointing on the actual street, away from the map, she understood.
Map reading is a learnt skill, it doesn't come naturally to anyone regardless of sex, culture, background.
Now, navigation and a kind of natural spatial knowledge is different, and I'd like to learn more about this. I would imagine it would be an innate skill to humans, but be limited to a certain size / level of detail. E.g forest floor, village, a couple of blocks, 100 people.
> Imo when it comes to that there is a huge difference between men and women, or perhaps more accurately people who are highly skilled in map-reading vs people who aren't.
If the second part is more accurate, why did you even bother mentioning the first? If it's correlation you don't even 100% believe in, leave it out.
Do you honestly think preferences for using maps are based on anything else besides someone's familiarity with maps and the situational context? Gender doesn't matter.
I would love a distance map that includes public transport travel time. For example, if I live close to metro/subway/train and I want to do really big grocery shopping. It would be interesting to see the nearest grocery that includes those I could reach by jumping on the metro and with minimal total walking.
It may be more effective to catch the train to a grocery in a completely different part of town than to walk 30 minutes to the one in your own neighborhood.
Applied to the maps in the article, this could end up introducing animation to the chart. If your local light rail arrives every 30 minutes, then your ETA to arrive at various different grocery stores is gradually changing, drawing nearer to the center, and climbs up a steep (half hour) cliff when you aren't close enough to the station to catch the train.
You could even colour the destinations by level of urgency - blue for destinations where you can casually stroll to the station, or red for ones where you really need to leave right away to catch the train.
I wrote a tool that kinda does that. It shows how far you can travel by different modes of transport, including public transit. It also work with time of day to account for both bus schedules and traffic.
How is this more useful than an ordered list of search results, exactly? Once you've picked your destination, based on travel time, you still want figure out how to get there.
Well it still maintains some geographic info by keeping the direction. This helps for instance in identifying clusters of places, so user can think: "If I go that way there a N other places nearby too". Also the cardinal directions are still preserved, which help to interface with user's preexisting geographic knowelege.
Well, to some degree, yes. Maybe it's even mostly true. But the fact that point A and B are close to point C by some mode of transportation does not guarantee that they are close to each other. They might be separated by some geographic feature like a river, mountain or large road that doesn't separate them from C. Or the transportation options between A and C and between B and C may be excellent, but horrible between A and B. And so on. You need a normal map, or very good prior knowledge of the geography indeed, to know that.
Honestly I think a standard map with the times for destinations of interest shown in a little caption next to each point would be more useful. That preserves the geographic location information visually.
The map doesn't guarantee that at all. Two items on the map can appear next to each other and take a very long time to get between -- perhaps they're separated by a freeway that you can't cross, for example.
Well, it's easier to see the distribution of distances. Knowing something is the 3rd closest is less useful that knowing it is actually 30 minutes away.
More so, it is common to want to go to more than one place in an outing. Most of the time when I am searching for the "nearest" X, I'm really searching for the X that is least out of the way between points A and B. This map doesn't help answer that question while an isochrone, or heatmap, or even standard map does.
Isochronic maps are pretty awesome. However, an isochrone-only projection that ignores geography is prone to the same sort of errors that the alternative creates. One simple example that is personal to me -- when I moved from SF to the East Bay, my commute into the city shortened by ~10 minutes because of where I'd been living (out by Ocean Beach) vs where I moved to and the nature of driving and public transit in the SF Bay Area. And yet as far as my friends who lived and worked in SF were concerned, I was now in this mystical place that they didn't really spend any time in or know much about (the perception of Oakland is also contributing here).
It'd be interesting to take travel data and cluster it such that you end up with an isopsychochronic projection. Commute visualizations I've seen end up feeling kind of close.
A bit off topic. What I really want in map software (specifically for finding my way): know that I know my way around certain areas. The beginning of my commute no matter where I go is full of turns every minute or two. It makes listening to audio books impossible because interrupted with "in 100 feet..." Constant.
Just day "go to $MAJORPOINT" then start giving me step by step directions.
I use Waze on my daily commute not because I don't know the way to work, but because I would like to be routed around traffic as well as possible.
Setting audio to alerts works when a traffic situation develops while I am driving and the optimal route changes on the fly (generating an alert). But, if there is a pre-existing situation when I start that's changing the route in a couple of places from the "normal" route I get 80%of the time, alerts will only notify me of it about it five seconds after I miss the unusual exit, when it starts finding a new route.
Of course the simple fix is to get a phone mount and just look at the route whenever you want - but then you're leaving the screen on constantly, or unlocking it at arm's reach while driving.
GPS should have an option to be silent until I deviate from the route. Or be silent if I frequently travel this road (for example at least twice this month)
For what it's worth, I think it would be computationally quite hard. You would have to pick a set of points and maybe isomap them from three dimensions (x, y, and time) to two, then find a visually acceptable cage transformation using those points as anchors. You'd have to do this for each query.
The location of the isochrones themselves are a function of time, depending on current traffic levels, when the next bus is scheduled to arrive, etc. Hence, this map can't be static. To really be accurate, it needs to collect that data and auto-refresh itself in short intervals.
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Basically, I feel that completely removing the physical map is okay until you've picked a target. Then, having to click on it to be able to see what the route looks like (which streets to take, etc.) is higher friction than I'd like. Instead, imagine if hovering would give you a route overlay, and as you hover your mouse over multiple places you're considering, you're already aware of the physical directions as well.
Having to click back and forth feels quite constraining.
This is simply feedback on a way I think it could be improved further, not to take away from how good it already is.
What would be cool about this is that it is still a map of the map, but the unit becomes time adjusted mile.
Imagine starting on the far south end of a congested city surrounded by a circular, relatively low-traffic highway. Points on the northern end of the city would be “closer” on such a map than points directly in the center.
You could certainly define a transformation that accounts for this, but I think it would necessarily defy most people’s intuitive interpretation of such a map.
choosing where to go for lunch will be a flash.
[1] https://mapumental.com/)
Speak for yourself! I feel way more confident getting around when I know the actual geography.
People do think about space and the environment in spatial terms and also in time. This article is basically replaying the same failure that Google is showing - that maps only have an economic value. "Pizza in San Francisco" has been a meme in geospatial hacker land for over a decade and this is another incarnation of it. People think about space in non economic terms more than in terms of how to sell stuff via advertisements. We think about safety, attractiveness, how accessible it is, whats the parking like, who we are with, where next we are going to, what is the ambiance like, how will it be when we try to get home, crime levels, any nearby arts and events on, is the football on at the stadium, is it a weekday or a weeknight, is it near a university, is it during term time, what kind of people are nearby, are the streets well lit, how noisy are the streets. etc. etc.
Now - this doesn't discount the work. I think that a 2D map - the paper analogy onto digital form also isn't good, so any research and attempt to think about what's good and working is worth looking at. Care should be taken when giving psychological or psychogeographical points to such different designs.
In terms of solving real problems, I don't see it as functionally any better than a list ordered by distance with a small compass showing directionality. Basically what you see on the left when you search google maps for "pizza in san francisco".
The benefit of that list is that it uses space much more efficiently and can show things like ratings and thumbnails. Whereas in the article's ui, you have to click on every circle to see what it is.
Put another way, maps are incredibly information dense but when you remove most of the information from them, they're just dense.
In general men prefer to navigate using a map, cardinal directions and can adapt their routefinding on the fly (the actual geography); women prefer to navigate using turn-by-turn directions and fixed landmarks ("five minutes that way," "make the second right," etc)
I've noticed this a lot, for example when traveling in a third-world country where education is not widespread I know many people outside of cab drivers can't actually read maps. It's something we take for granted in the US. So when my friend was trying to give a local directions to a certain place by pointing to different places on a map, the local wasn't understanding. When I stepped in and provided turn by turn directions pointing on the actual street, away from the map, she understood.
Now, navigation and a kind of natural spatial knowledge is different, and I'd like to learn more about this. I would imagine it would be an innate skill to humans, but be limited to a certain size / level of detail. E.g forest floor, village, a couple of blocks, 100 people.
If the second part is more accurate, why did you even bother mentioning the first? If it's correlation you don't even 100% believe in, leave it out.
Deleted Comment
It may be more effective to catch the train to a grocery in a completely different part of town than to walk 30 minutes to the one in your own neighborhood.
You could even colour the destinations by level of urgency - blue for destinations where you can casually stroll to the station, or red for ones where you really need to leave right away to catch the train.
https://www.mapnificent.net
https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/visualizing-commute-times-3...
It'd be interesting to take travel data and cluster it such that you end up with an isopsychochronic projection. Commute visualizations I've seen end up feeling kind of close.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/us-commutes-revea...
Just day "go to $MAJORPOINT" then start giving me step by step directions.
Setting audio to alerts works when a traffic situation develops while I am driving and the optimal route changes on the fly (generating an alert). But, if there is a pre-existing situation when I start that's changing the route in a couple of places from the "normal" route I get 80%of the time, alerts will only notify me of it about it five seconds after I miss the unusual exit, when it starts finding a new route.
Of course the simple fix is to get a phone mount and just look at the route whenever you want - but then you're leaving the screen on constantly, or unlocking it at arm's reach while driving.