The problems with this are myriad and ugly. Jeff Jarvis quickly dispatched a post covering the salient sticking points. (And, appropriately, there are good issues being raised in the comments.) I’m in agreement with Jarvis and others that this is an all-around bad idea.

Chalk it up to a failure of empathy.

Firstly, comment traffic is prized by many site owners. Especially those who take pride in the conversations happening around their content. Had Google wrapped their heads around this point of view, they might have foreseen how shifting the location and control of these conversations could be perceived as “stealing” something from site owners. The product (and the promotion of it) could have been adjusted accordingly, and fears assuaged.

Perhaps more importantly, Google seems to have failed to recognize how the audience’s changing notions about them might color this reaction. A company’s empathy for its users needs to be informed not just by its own sense of identity, but by whether that perception squares with popular sentiment.

Google might think users don’t have the right idea about their intent with Sidewiki, that these people just don’t get it this is so cool we’re trying to help them why do they hate it? But they need to remember they’re pulling in the kind of revenue that dwarfs the GDP of small nations now. With that reality comes an entirely different set of expectations about how they can and should behave. Simply by virtue of size and clout, actions formerly benign can now portend evil intent to the audience if handled badly.

Is that fair? Not terribly. Is that a psychological reality Google needs to recognize and deal with? Absolutely. Tone deafness isn’t an option. Not if they want to address the growing dissonance between how they think of themselves and what we see as users.

Good intentions aren’t enough for Google anymore. They just pave the road to, well, you know…

For the sake of fitting it all in, we sometimes condense (or forget to expand) a design to the point of impinging on hierarchy and causality. Often, the pieces we’re putting together as web designers have relationships that cannot be effectively illuminated through proximity alone.

Debussy defined music as the space between the notes. So should it be with design.

Which Way?

So allow me to register a humble gripe with the print output of Google Maps. Traveling through the Adirondacks a short while ago I printed out some driving directions that made me and several other fairly sharp cookies do a double-take:

It’s the distance bit. Are those distances on the right end of the rows from the locations on the same line, or the distances to them? After a moment of troubling, you can figure it out, sure. But figuring things out is not what you should be doing while winding your way through traffic on a high speed six lane highway.

“Wait. How far until the next—Fudruckers! We missed the turn…”

This layout takes what should be a straight-up linear relationship and introduces a tedious moment of forced cognition—and subsequently doubt—by failing to expand and clearly define the relationships between items.

Change of Direction

While it won’t win any beauty pageants, here’s one possible take on expanding Google’s layout to clearly suss out the connections:

An exhaustive, deeply explored treatment this ain’t. And I’m sure any number of bright young design things could pick it up and turn it into something better. But the point should be clear.

By expanding the design, we’ve allowed the opportunity to clearly flag relationships between data in a way that’s unmistakable. You wouldn’t print out this version and be left wondering which way is up.

Give that design a little room to breathe, and we might all find our way.

Today they added two more notches to the satellite zoom for a scary-good level of detail. I hopped on the site when I found out and immediately started the obligatory eyeballing of my neighborhood, office, etc. (What the—? There’s someone in my ‘hood with a rooftop pool?!)

The pictures that make up these maps are taken from different angles and spatial planes by necessity. (Kind of hard to photograph the whole Earth from one spot, no?) This can lead to some pretty mind-bending results. Check out this shot of Rockefeller Center in New York City (direct link).

Woah. Look at those buildings collide. Smash ‘em up good! Obviously the shots of The Rock were taken in a different pass than the ones that include St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which are altogether different from the ones that show the southern buildings of the Rockefeller Center complex. The result is a glorious architectural Clash of the Titans. Sweet.

UPDATE: Gothamist has picked up on all this fun.