The most interesting part of this to me is the UX feedback from the comments here.
Many people, myself included, say they had no idea at first that the photos were all meant to be from the same location, even though the very first sentence of the instructions was "There are five photos from the same place."
I'm pretty sure I read the instructions, I guess that just didn't register? An opportunity to reflect on how hard it can be to properly communicate with users, I guess.
OTOH I understood the instructions immediately. This is a fundamental issue in UX. Some users will know right away and others will not. Maybe a better sentence structure? Maybe something like "Guess the 1 location where all these photos were taken" (?)
From my experience, most people don't read the instructions or text notes anyway. So its possible that an even better UX is one where the user figures out what they can do through intuition rather than reading.
>From my experience, most people don't read the instructions or text notes anyway.
This happens in my life constantly when dealing with family IT problems or mentoring juniors at work (and sometimes working with seniors too!). People just do not read the output of their computers.
I once wrote a final exam for a linear algebra course with a section "all the following are false, explain why." I did it to make it easier than a T/F, but it was unintentionally devious. So many students said some of them were true anyway and tried to prove them...
added to the more explicite sentence, maybe just connect the dots on the map with lines so the user asks himself/herself : why are they connected and then realizes
Oh, I didn't even realize that until I read your comment. I got a lucky first guess and thought "wow, I'm good at this," and then they just kept getting worse, lol.
I guess it's because that information is dropped at the wrong time, because right after that you first have to spend time on figuring out how the weird UI works so you can actually make your guess. Why does the map have to be hidden behind a button, and why does it have to cover the picture? There is so much wasted space on the screen, why not use it to show both at the same time?
The issue is they're clearly not all from the same place, so the instruction can't really register. They were all taken within a few hundred feet of each other, but that doesn't mean they were taken from the same place. In today’s one was aerial while another was indoors — not the same place!
The instructions would be better if they read “the five photos were taken at different times, but were all taken within a few hundred feet of each other”.
> Each day, a random location is generated, along with five photos within five miles.
So the pictures are all within 53,000 feet of each other (10 miles). Note that the random location is just some point, and probably not in a town or city.
I dunno, they were taken at different times too, so none of them were within thousands of miles of each other relative to the galactic core. So that sentence is clearly not true either. "from the same place", place ~ region or as easily place ~ tripod position. Brevity and clarity are in tension with each other. Gotta decide where on the pareto front you want to be.
I got 19 miles away with my first guess, the map zoomed in and I thought "that's a weird bug", zoomed it out, and then proceeded to guess other guesses that were hundreds of miles away. Interesting concept, but poorly communicated.
It was communicated in the very first sentence of the instructions. It's just that both you and me failed to read the instructions. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
Sometimes location and/or formatting is either bad or goes against "common convention". For example here on HN there is a mostly ok search build in. I had found it only after several years of using the site, and if I had to search for something before that, I've used google/ddg with "site:" option. Why? I guess because in 99% of all sites search is at the header, and footer contains zero useful information. I was trained that there is nothing there and so I've quite literally "didn't see" search box for a long time.
My first guess was 19 miles away and I totally thought they were in 5 different locations. I had lived in Pittsburgh for a short time and knew exactly those iron bridges were probably WV/Pittsburgh area.
Wordle is similar though and doesn't seem to suffer from this ambiguity. Is it because the ui feedback from Wordle makes it more clear you're guessing the same word? I thought it was pretty clear here with the distance.
I started to suspect that it was the same location after the third photo. Not that the photographs themselves seemed related but that the challenge didn't feel like a cohesive "game" unless the distance was a hint (and not a score on the single attempt).
My problem was the state lines. My first guess was somewhere in West Virginia, which happened to be right, but being from the west coast, I had trouble eyeballing where to click for West Virginia.
The game is great, but I'm shouting to the wind about the decline in quality of online maps. For example, I can barely see roads on Google maps any more. The lines are faint and low contrast. Zooming in doesn't help because the font remains tiny. Map makers hate middle-aged people.
Google Maps is also really prejudiced against railways! Maps by the Ordnance Survey (the national cartography agency of Britain) have railways indicated by a solid, thick black line - more prominent than most roads. Google Maps shows railways less visibly than a footpath!
I do UX research for a complex simulation training device. We record and catalogue dozens of hours of video.
You would be amazed how many users miss key information presented to them. You’d think you can plan and predict, but they always manage to find a new and surprising way to just not get stuff.
UX testing on simplest grittiest prototypes yields the best results in my experience. The more work you put into it before showing it to users, the more irritated you will be.
Ah, that explains why it only showed one flag at the end - I was thinking, "but where were all the other photos from?" I totally missed that information!
Maybe if I hadn't played things like Geoguesser and was expecting it to work the same way, I would have read it a bit more carefully.
I see it as a combination of distraction and being eager to consume something.
Everything in the page (and before that, in the link title) screams “this is a game” yet Start was pressed without reading the 33-words down the bold How to play.
A U issue more than UX.
Place does have many meanings, and in the context of playing a game, there's always room for playing with stuff like that. They could be taken from the exact same geographical coordinates, the same city, the same state. The photos could've all been grabbed from the same website or the place could've been "by a river", whether that's the Monongahela River or the Colorado River.
If you click the question mark, you get the help page which clarifies the data used:
> ~500,000 geo-tagged images from Wikimedia Commons. Each day, a random location is generated, along with five photos within five miles.
In a remote area, there will likely only be a few notable landmarks nearby so you can expect to see many pictures of a single landmark. This might be why people think the pictures are supposed to of the same place.
I think it's that software engineers don't know how to read what they don't write, that being instructions and documentation. I am making an assumption here on the category of those complianing about the UX, but I doubt it is far off.
Yep. I was distracted by the pretty colors I guess, because I made exactly the same error. Got a little frustrated and couldn't see the attraction of the game until I saw in the comments that all the pictures are in the same location.
An option would be to change the name so it communicates the goal as clearly as possible. People read it and interpret "this" as referring to a specific photo, not that the photos come from the same place.
One problem is that the instructions are not visible until you click on the question mark icon (at least on mobile) so I didn't even realize there were instructions until I read your comment.
Right click image, open in new tab, read URL of image which is helpfully descriptive, search wikipedia for that bridge. Wikipedia article shows location of the bridge on a map.
In reality, I didn't cheat until the 2nd picture, because a picture of some guys shaking a politician's hand isn't really that helpful. If the image didn't tell you what union was talking to what politician, I wouldn't have been able to look up the street address of the union hall. Even then, I still couldn't find the town on the map, so I had to eyeball it to get 0 mi.
Yes, you can use a ruler and the scale to get closer with each guess, regardless of what the picture shows. I use the built in drawing app on Linux Mint.
Here is another attempt, with my triangulation circles written (don't judge me)
Imagine drawing a circle with a radius of your error each time you guess. After the second guess, there will be only two intersecting points. A careful third guess should tell you which of the two it is.
They are, yeah. I didn’t realise to start with. I played a couple of older games and managed to get 0 miles on one too - though there was a hint in the second photo that got me within 12 miles and it was easier find it from there.
The bridge in the fitst photo is an old one lane bridge, probably was used by carriages. It looks like it mostly just connects a small neighborhood of houses, not a main road by any means. There are probably newer concrete bridges out of frame, but they're not as picturesque as old steel bridges.
I’ve never been to the US but somehow West Virginia was my first guess and I got it down to zero miles eventually. I don’t know why that state is so particularly recognizable
Agreed. I grew up in Pittsburgh, but even after 10 years after moving away, I immediately recognized the first picture as "somewhere in West Virginia" as if instinctually.
I got 0 miles because the first photo was exactly the kind of landscape I grew up with. It also helps that almost all of the Texas photos are sure to have a flag or the shape of Texas somewhere.
I got very lucky. My first guess was only off by 5.5 miles. If I knew the exact location ahead of time I probably couldn't have gotten that close if I tried, considering the zoom level of the map when I guessed it. That got me close enough to get right on for the second guess.
0 mi in 4 guesses. The funny part was I forgot to look at the photos after the first two and had to go back and look at the photos to see what I missed. The first photo has a bridge, so that informed the clicks a bit since I knew I needed a stream, so some help from the content.
I managed to get 0 mi, as well. I guessed the state based on the first image and was able to rapidly narrow it down from there. Kind of cool today's happened to be in the state I was born in, yet have no memories of.
Unimpressed by this game. The accuracy on the scale is off by as much as 25%, as can be seen here: https://i.imgur.com/NOvqCnV.png. As the only information you're given other than a new photo is the distance, this is a serious problem.
What's worse, the 'correct' location radius doesn't even include the locations where all the photos were taken!
It's quite simply unacceptable to claim that all the photos are of the same place and then have the exact location within the photo not be within the accepted answer radius. Geoguesser, for example, REQUIRES you to identify the exact location within ~150 meters (in the worldwide mode) and they are actually correct with that degree of precision. This error of 9.5 miles is 15,000 meters away.
Yeah my first guess on #74 was 7.7 miles away (!) so I thought for sure I would get it. But it turns out that the flag location is actually 14 miles away according to Google Maps, and the multiple photos "of the same place" are over 6 miles apart. So I kept getting weird numbers for my guesses that didn't line up with the geography.
I kept getting wrong answer after wrong answer despite the fact that I was CONVINCED I was triangulating properly.....
But no! The size of the ruler kept changing!! I was using a constant 80px for it, and it was changing by as much as 30px as you zoomed in and out.
What a waste of time.
However I did get within 7mi once despite this terrible UX, because I saw a pic and was like "goddamn if that's not in non-Chicago Illinois" so I was within 200mi on my first guess and knew how to constrain my further guesses.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but that’s exactly how I would expect it to work and how it does work with Apple Maps and Google Maps. You can zoom at different increments than the scale label shows. Without changing the ruler size, how could this work? Am I misunderstanding you?
It's an interesting site, but why do so many of these guessing games have single page applications without state in the URL?
https://guessthe.game/ functions the same way - please include the day in the URL so that if I want to go back through your backlog (or show someone something from your backlog) it's easy.
If I snoop the traffic and watch the redirects I sometimes can:
What's adds to that annoyance is that the only way to navigate the games is a "prev" link. There's no way to jump directly to a game or go to the next game. This means every day it becomes more time consuming to get to the first game. And if you accidentally refresh the page, have fun!
Theoretically, if you choose the first two points at random, then you have a 50-50 chance of guessing right on the third guess (the two circles from the first two guesses have at most two intersecting points) and should always get the correct answer on the 4th guess.
The original “where in the world?” location guessing game is GeoGuesser from 2013. There are competitions and some pro competitors can pinpoint locations within feet, though some rules allow the player to browse Google Maps in a separate window.
Rules? That sounds like a kind of Honor Rule since it seems impossible to enforce. I think it’s better to play with a time limit instead in order to make aids impractical. Of course in a duel or something you can just start the countdown after the first guess is made.
Readit News
Many people, myself included, say they had no idea at first that the photos were all meant to be from the same location, even though the very first sentence of the instructions was "There are five photos from the same place."
I'm pretty sure I read the instructions, I guess that just didn't register? An opportunity to reflect on how hard it can be to properly communicate with users, I guess.
From my experience, most people don't read the instructions or text notes anyway. So its possible that an even better UX is one where the user figures out what they can do through intuition rather than reading.
This fascinated me ~90s computer gaming. There were clear camps of "people who always read the manual" and "people who never never read the manual."
This happens in my life constantly when dealing with family IT problems or mentoring juniors at work (and sometimes working with seniors too!). People just do not read the output of their computers.
I guess it's because that information is dropped at the wrong time, because right after that you first have to spend time on figuring out how the weird UI works so you can actually make your guess. Why does the map have to be hidden behind a button, and why does it have to cover the picture? There is so much wasted space on the screen, why not use it to show both at the same time?
Was it great? No. But I also didn't have to spend any time figuring anything put.
Context matters the most.
Dead Comment
The instructions would be better if they read “the five photos were taken at different times, but were all taken within a few hundred feet of each other”.
> Each day, a random location is generated, along with five photos within five miles.
So the pictures are all within 53,000 feet of each other (10 miles). Note that the random location is just some point, and probably not in a town or city.
It was communicated in the very first sentence of the instructions. It's just that both you and me failed to read the instructions. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
People just aren’t good with words and will come up with all sorts of reasons they didn’t see it.
That’s not to say I’m any better, just that I get to see all the requests and excuses. Bolder, bigger, alerts, doesn’t matter.
The game is great, but I'm shouting to the wind about the decline in quality of online maps. For example, I can barely see roads on Google maps any more. The lines are faint and low contrast. Zooming in doesn't help because the font remains tiny. Map makers hate middle-aged people.
You would be amazed how many users miss key information presented to them. You’d think you can plan and predict, but they always manage to find a new and surprising way to just not get stuff.
UX testing on simplest grittiest prototypes yields the best results in my experience. The more work you put into it before showing it to users, the more irritated you will be.
Maybe if I hadn't played things like Geoguesser and was expecting it to work the same way, I would have read it a bit more carefully.
> ~500,000 geo-tagged images from Wikimedia Commons. Each day, a random location is generated, along with five photos within five miles.
In a remote area, there will likely only be a few notable landmarks nearby so you can expect to see many pictures of a single landmark. This might be why people think the pictures are supposed to of the same place.
One more arrow in the quiver of "users don't read"
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Dead Comment
After the first 2 I stopped attempting cities and figured the picture didn't matter, it was a game of triangulation.
Nice game, I like it, even though I've never set foot in the US.
[1] Spoilers! - https://i.imgur.com/azCWc3i.png
In reality, I didn't cheat until the 2nd picture, because a picture of some guys shaking a politician's hand isn't really that helpful. If the image didn't tell you what union was talking to what politician, I wouldn't have been able to look up the street address of the union hall. Even then, I still couldn't find the town on the map, so I had to eyeball it to get 0 mi.
Here is another attempt, with my triangulation circles written (don't judge me)
Attempt: https://i.imgur.com/Hz3c37c.png
Also, as an American, the fact that I recognized the first picture to within 50 miles makes me sad. Our bridges should not look like that, even there.
I managed to get 60 mi away.
I think 0 mi away is very impressive. Especially since you had already used some of your attempts without initially aiming for triangulation!
Kudos to you :)
Spoiler: https://i.imgur.com/HK6sNsf.png
What's worse, the 'correct' location radius doesn't even include the locations where all the photos were taken!
SPOILER FOR GAME #60:
Game #60 has a clue that shows YOU ARE HERE: https://i.imgur.com/98OXlal.png which is exactly here (google maps [1]) https://i.imgur.com/KdN4OCh.png which corresponds exactly to my guess location https://i.imgur.com/eCy97r6.png. However, they claim that the correct location is here: https://i.imgur.com/cSasI3g.png or https://i.imgur.com/ChuisIx.jpeg (google [2]), which is actually 9.5 miles away and outside their 5 mile radius, so it scored me as missing by 4.5 miles.
It's quite simply unacceptable to claim that all the photos are of the same place and then have the exact location within the photo not be within the accepted answer radius. Geoguesser, for example, REQUIRES you to identify the exact location within ~150 meters (in the worldwide mode) and they are actually correct with that degree of precision. This error of 9.5 miles is 15,000 meters away.
1: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.3419792,-122.7415299,14.62z?...
2: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.2970892,-122.5563029,1891m/d...
I kept getting wrong answer after wrong answer despite the fact that I was CONVINCED I was triangulating properly.....
But no! The size of the ruler kept changing!! I was using a constant 80px for it, and it was changing by as much as 30px as you zoomed in and out.
What a waste of time.
However I did get within 7mi once despite this terrible UX, because I saw a pic and was like "goddamn if that's not in non-Chicago Illinois" so I was within 200mi on my first guess and knew how to constrain my further guesses.
https://guessthe.game/ functions the same way - please include the day in the URL so that if I want to go back through your backlog (or show someone something from your backlog) it's easy.
If I snoop the traffic and watch the redirects I sometimes can:
https://guessthe.game/?fpg=110
But this site makes it even more obnoxious:
https://pudding.cool/games/where/?uuid=i135v&rs=x0hdn&upc=9a...
Really? UUID? (side note: that's not a UUID)
URL driven-ness is such a great ux feature I also get annoyed when sites don’t use it. https://skateboardle.com
I'm using React because it's easy to re-use components. Which alternatives are there for that?
For React I've used react-router for this:
https://ui.dev/react-router-url-parameters
Edit: wait, they're all the same place? I was confused on that point. I thought each was a different state.
got 64 (i think it's the rusty bridges...)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoGuessr