Image this: You’re driving on a crowded freeway, getting ready to alter lanes and cross a tractor-trailer. As you verify your mirrors, a loud chime in your automobile’s infotainment display screen rings out.
It’s Google Maps, asking whether or not a stalled automobile remains to be on the shoulder, as different drivers have reported. A immediate seems—Sure or No—requiring a response inside seconds. Your already taxed mind now has one other determination to course of, all when you’re shifting at 60 miles per hour.
Eventualities like this turned attainable final summer season, when Google overhauled its standard navigation app. Since then, drivers utilizing Google Maps incessantly obtain prompts to substantiate an “incident,” equivalent to a police car or stalled automobile, that different customers have flagged. These prompts are introduced with a chime in addition to textual content and a timer that devour the underside chunk of the app show. If there’s a approach to flip off this incident verification function, I haven’t discovered it. (A Google spokesperson didn’t reply once I requested.)
These prompts might be annoying to drivers who discover them intrusive. Extra troublingly, specialists in UX and human components fear that they’ll trigger distraction that results in crashes.
“If the request occurs on a stretch of street the place there isn’t that a lot one going round you, it’s most likely not an issue,” mentioned Birsen Donmez, a professor of commercial engineering on the College of Toronto who researches distracted driving. “But when it pops up when you already know your flip is developing and you actually need to focus, it might confuse you and divert your consideration.”
That’s an unsettling downside for the a whole lot of thousands and thousands of people that use Google Maps, in addition to for everybody who shares the street with them.
‘That is an irrelevant piece of data’
Google has dominated navigation since launching Maps in February 2005. Although rivals have appeared—Apple, MapQuest, and TomTom GO amongst them—none has come near matching Google’s person base. In 2013, Google solidified its lead by acquiring the Israeli startup Waze, whose crowdsourced site visitors and incident reporting expertise later formed key options of Maps regardless that it remained a separate app.
At this time, Google Maps guides way more journeys than different wayfinding instruments. In response to a 2024 MarketWatch analysis, 70% of U.S. drivers used Google Maps, in comparison with simply 25% for each Waze and Apple Maps. MapQuest, as soon as ubiquitous, is now not a market chief however still had 17 million regular users as of 2022.
However for the primary time in years, Google Maps now faces a reputable menace. Totally recovered from an inauspicious 2012 launch, Apple Maps is now a vastly improved service that has garnered praise for design components like object-based directions (“Flip left after the subsequent site visitors gentle”) that may appear extra intuitive than Google Maps’ instructions (“In 500 toes, flip left”). In the meantime, the iPhone—which options Apple Maps as its default—has been grabbing market share from Android.
With competitors with Apple Maps intensifying, Google unveiled main revisions to its mapping software final summer season. Google Maps had already invited customers to submit details about noticed site visitors incidents, which the corporate would then share with different drivers. Now, with its new replace, the corporate announced, “different drivers can affirm the incident with only a faucet.”
What meaning in apply is that drivers incessantly hear a chime as a query seems on their infotainment display screen, equivalent to “Stalled car reported 51 minutes in the past from Google Maps drivers. Is that this nonetheless there?” A countdown progress bar pushes drivers to shortly faucet a Sure or No button. “It makes you are feeling like you need to reply or get it off of your display screen,” mentioned Kate Moran, vice chairman for analysis and content material at Nielsen Norman Group, a UX advisory apply.
After a number of seconds the immediate disappears, both as a result of the driving force answered the query or as a result of the timer hit zero.
Innocuous although it might appear, demanding “only a faucet” might be dangerously distracting, College of Toronto’s Donmez mentioned, as a result of infotainment touchscreens inevitably require customers to look away from the roadway forward. She added that inexperienced or aged drivers usually tend to wrestle “to suppress irrelevant stimulus.”
Donmez is especially involved by the urgency of Google Maps’ requests for affirmation. “Drivers sometimes modulate their distraction engagement primarily based on what’s developing on the street, and that’s why crashes don’t occur,” she mentioned. As an illustration, many drivers instinctively wait till after finishing a lane change earlier than they choose a brand new podcast or modify the air-con. However Google Maps’s chime and countdown progress bar are designed to demand instant consideration, no matter street situations.
Defenders of Google Maps’s new UX would possibly observe that Waze, the opposite navigation app owned by Alphabet, has lengthy requested customers to substantiate previous studies of site visitors incidents. However that doesn’t imply Waze’s design is protected. In a 2019 paper, a crew of Carnegie Mellon researchers famous that Waze is “harmful to not solely the driving force but in addition to close by drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists.”
Once I requested how Google Maps evaluated the protection of its UX replace earlier than rolling it out, a company spokesperson replied in an e-mail, “We take security very critically and repeatedly take a look at our options for driver distraction.”
In response to a company blog post, Google Maps’s new UX has been distributed “globally.” The corporate doesn’t seem to have provided customers an possibility to show off the verification prompts or restrict them to particular forms of incidents. One person requested on the Google Maps Community discussion board tips on how to disable the “’nonetheless there?’ questions whereas driving,” however that question went unanswered.
Notably, lots of the incidents flagged by Google Maps are unrelated to site visitors security, equivalent to automobiles on the shoulder that passing drivers typically encounter with out second thought. “More often than not that is an irrelevant piece of data for security,” Donmez mentioned.
Given their potential for annoyance in addition to distraction, these prompts shouldn’t be inescapable, she mentioned. “Some drivers might discover the function helpful,” she mentioned, “however they need to have the power to simply override it.”
Moran agreed. “It’s not that the intention behind the function is unhealthy, however the best way it’s been carried out is the issue,” she advised me. “ expertise can be permitting individuals to say, ‘Don’t immediate me with these dialogues anymore.’ However even higher can be to require individuals to decide in. As an alternative of turning it on by default, permit individuals who is likely to be extra enthusiastic about being within the Google group to say ‘sure, I’ll reply these questions and proactively present knowledge.’”
As an alternative, all Google Maps customers are actually being peppered with verification requests, whether or not they prefer it or not.
‘It might simply be a scarcity of foresight’
As to why Google Maps modified its UX to request person confirmations, Moran suggests the corporate most likely desires to construct a extra present dataset of street situations. “For those who actually need to know if one thing remains to be on the street, the quickest approach to get that data is to ask the particular person driving by,” she mentioned.
However there may be one other risk: The prompts’ unavoidable and aggressive design stands out as the brainchild of challenge managers instructed to extend person engagement by any means needed.
“Individuals who make UX product selections are sometimes beneath a number of strain to realize short-sighted, short-term metrics,” Moran mentioned. “It might simply be a scarcity of foresight that this was going to be distracting or annoying.” (Google Maps didn’t reply to questions on its causes for demanding that each one customers affirm street situations).
For now, no less than, Google Maps customers are caught with its new UX. It’s too quickly to know whether or not the design will enhance crashes, however the menace is actual, notably given the app’s large person base. Highway security advocates have already expressed concern about distraction resulting from increasingly complex infotainment systems, as automakers try to supply the flashiest designs (regardless that many automobile house owners find touchscreens woefully inferior to the knobs and dials they changed). In a 2022 study, researchers at Drexel College concluded that the comparatively easy infotainment methods of the early 2010s had been already a statistically vital threat issue for crashes.
But, infotainment methods stay unregulated within the U.S. In 2012, the Nationwide Freeway Visitors Security Administration issued voluntary guidance proposing most thresholds for the time drivers should look away from the street to perform an infotainment activity, however inside a number of years automakers had been routinely violating it. They’ve paid no penalty for doing so.
With the Trump administration reflexively hostile to laws, new federal safeguards pertaining to navigation instruments or infotainment methods are unlikely. Nonetheless, Moran thinks that lawsuits involving crashes attributable to distracted driving would possibly pressure Google Maps to alter course. “The primary time I observed this new function, I assumed ‘Wow, I’m shocked their authorized crew is okay with this,’” she mentioned.
Alternatively, the market’s invisible hand would possibly render its personal verdict about Google’s UX design: Its customers can at all times switch to Apple.
