I’m a former Google employee (I worked in Developer Relations), and I love contributing to Maps.
However, there’s no mechanism for me to escalate blatant bugs, other than the generic “Submit feedback”. As a former employee, I know that unfortunately these requests end up in a low-priority queue, and have a slim chance of actually getting noticed.
I would like to suggest adding a category here in the Discourse forum, for Maps bugs. We can keep it limited to confirmed Maps bugs (though probably “Feedback” would be a better name), because understandably the team won’t want to be overwhelmed with feature requests via this avenue.
I understand this does require the Google employees monitoring this forum to advocate for the features suggested here. Such a role would fall under the umbrella of Maps DevReal, so hopefully there is headcount for it.
To put this request another way: by creating such a category, the Maps team would get high-quality QA from a select group of devoted power users, for free.
Thanks in advance to @Julie_A and other Googlers who may read this.
I strongly agree with that. I also think it’s unfortunate for Google Maps internal feedback feature that users can’t see others’ reports or suggestions. Adobe sometimes uses UserVoice.com. This way, the community handles tracking, sorting, and prioritizing the bugs on its own.
Hey @dandv Thanks for your suggestion! I don’t really focus a lot on Google Maps related issues and I understand that the teams prefer to keep the Local Guides program separate from the Google Maps Help community as the goals/focus is slightly different.
As this new version of Connect is new, I’m sure the team will be busy going through the various feedbacks submitted. Have you also submitted this suggestion using their form found in this post?
I don’t mind seeing it in this post as it will be interesting to see what others feel about it too. (And I can already see a few people typing out their replies! )
For years we had a dedicated category here on Connects for exact what you are proposing. It was called “Idea exchange”.'(as far as I recall). There were two very negative side effects of this section in my opinion:
The ratio between ideas implemented and the number of ideas suggested was absurdly small.
Google never responded to anything
If a new feature got implemented, no acknowledgement was given back to those who proposed it in the Idea Exchange.
So users quickly understood that the main purpose of Idea Exchange was to keep enthusiastic LGs happy and content by providing an outlet for ideas even though they were probably never read by Googlers or used for anything.
From our interaction with Googlers on this forum it seems that in-app is now the preferred feedback method. To Google’s credit, this in-app feature has been improved quite a bit so feedback gets sorted by the users while submitting the feedback.
In my experience, if you really need to reach the decision-makers at Google Maps, then taking your issue to the Maps-related online media is a lot more effective. Google is more likely to react to public criticism than friendly feedback from users.
Maybe there needs to be some filtering and exclusivity for a new high quality feedback mechanism. Maybe access could be limited.
Cheers
Morten
PS: I have tried to share feature suggestions via the volunteer product experts in the Maps Support forum. I got the sense that this is not something they ever deal with. They are so tuned in on Maps data accuracy and nothing else.
Why do you think we should separate Google Maps issues from the Local Guides program? As someone who has observed and participated in the Local Guides program for years, I believe many of us have come across various frustrating issues and bugs with Google Maps, such as:
Photos or reviews being hidden
Issues with uploading images
Edits not getting approved
Issues we encounter because we use the Google Maps app extensively as power users
In many ways, we are like super test users who know the platform best. You can also see many reports and feature suggestions here on Local Guides Connect, so it’s clear that people are either confused or simply want to post these issues within this community.
I agree with you—perhaps it would make more sense to have a dedicated section for these issues within the Google Maps Support Community instead of here but we as a group should definitely be a part of it.
From my sparse interactions with Googlers working on Maps, I’m surprised how deeply specialized they are on a tiny aspect of Maps. We as power users can often share long known bugs to their surprise and provide feedback on how features interact and crash.
One recent crash example is the introduction of the new “Updates from Visitors” that got promoted to Local Guides as a new way to earn points surprisingly quickly. This new type of contribution was named “Captions”, dispite this term had already been used for years to descripe another Maps feature for years i.e., texts added to describe a photo.
With thousands of employees working on Maps, I understand that the few people responsible can not be dealing with users and power users on a daily basis, but I wonder if the Googlers responsible for User Experience could be interested in having an exclusive forum of power users at hand. It could be under an NDA on some aspects.
I agree with your comment about “Updates from Visitors.”
I believe that for product owners and people in charge, Google Maps users, including us as primary data contributors, should be central to the entire process. But instead when reading Local Guides Connect or the Google Maps Support Community, it often feels like almost nobody is paying attention to this at all.
A dedicated, organized category (perhaps with upvotes) would not only make it easier for them to view bugs and reports, as @dandv suggested, but it could also help ensure that our voices are heard.
Additionally, I think the feedback should be public and open source.
I often think I should apply for a job at Google again just to escalate bugs to the right teams (Maps and Photos being the most egregious).
For what it’s worth, Facebook treated their Places contributors with much more respect. In 2013 or so, I was invited to their HQ (I lived near Menlo Park back then) among with a few other people who had made significant contributions, for a day onsite with several Facebook employees who collected our feedback. We got swag and were shown the top of the FB building, which was landscaped with local plants and some other cool design elements.
Maybe they could use some kind of AI to collect feedback from various sources (including Google Local Guides Connect) and categorize it. I’ve seen this technique used by some companies now. The only downside is that, as contributors, we wouldn’t really be able to see their progress or what people report in a sorted way.
Actually, they can and they should. Collecting user feedback is part of the job description for a Developer Advocate. I was one at Google, and I regularly relayed coalesced feedback from users to the appropriate teams.
Maybe this can explain some of this:
It seems to me that management is disproportionately prioritizing resources to developing fun and exciting new features rather than maintenance and the necessary bug fixing.
Những chỉnh sửa không được tự động phê duyệt thì có nghĩa phải chờ đợi nhân viên google phê duyệt. Vì số lượng yêu cầu quá nhiều, ngôn ngữ bất đồng, tiêu chí để kiểm duyệt có vẻ khắt khe v.v Nên nhiều đề xuất chỉnh sửa của hướng dẫn viên địa phương chân chính không được chấp nhận, mặc dù đề xuất chỉnh sửa chính xác. Điều này gây ra sự chán nản, biết trên bản đồ sai vẫn không muốn chỉnh sửa.
Tôi rất quan tâm và trân trọng cảm ơn các ý kiến bày tỏ của các bạn trên connect
That’s very typical PM operation at Google. Shipping even half-baked products or features gets you a promotion. Pursuing quality (“Product Excellence”) does not.
@MaxFlieger The Local Guides program is (my loose interpretation) to foster an active community to boost user generated content and has a more social slant to its goals and activities. This forum is all about retaining users… encouraging them to stay, spend time on here reading posts and sharing their own experiences.
Google Maps is a huge beast and its primary goal (again, my loose interpretation) is navigation. Google Maps Help Community has a very different tone to it where people dive in and out whenever they have a problem to report or trying to find a solution to a problem. It’s not trying to keep users there. Users should (hopefully) find their answers there and then leave.
The first three points you mentioned do fall under the remit of the Local Guides program so those issues can be mentioned, discussed and escalated here. The fourth point is very broad so it depends on the specific Google Maps feature you’re referencing.
The Local Guides team are not Google Maps developers so they can’t directly answer or help resolve bugs but they can help gather feedback from the community to pass on to the Google Maps team.
The very difference in nature of the two forums is why they both exists separately. There are overlaps and that’s why we have very passionate power users here on Connect who, I hope, are happy to stay on Connect, mingle with the community and help educate them with their vast experiences.
As you can imagine, it’s tricky to form a line that clearly defines which Google teams are responsible for what. For me, anything that is navigation related, maps imagery, the more geo related topics are clearly for the Google Maps team. For the user generated content portion of Maps like reviews, ratings, business info etc… those go to the Local Guides team to first gather and then pass on to Maps if it requires their technical support. Ultimately, everything still goes to the Maps team.
@dandv@levanhien On Connect, we support and encourage users to use any language that they are comfortable with. We are a global community so that’s why we provide convenient translation tools to break down any language barrier.
@MortenCopenhagen while I agree with your statement, it doesn’t explain why it takes so long to approve or reject edits and it times out after 90 days in many cases.
The only explanation, I can think of, would be that Google decided to use AI for this purpose, but for some reason it fails too many times and a human operator needs to intervene anyway.
I’m not sure the 90 days known from road edits also apply to normal edit.
I made the assumption based on the fact that the number of edits that go pending and later get approved has gone down dramatically. It is approaching nil maybe 1-3 percent only.
Remember these observations are:
Not done systematically/properly counted
Based on normal - not road - edits
I often try to make edits that has been rejected before (mainly naming violations like all caps, location and category stuffing, and unnecessary legal jargon).
These factors can explain why I see such low late approval rates.
On the other hand I do make a lot of edits. And I am keen to learn from what edits get approve.
Do you see a lot of late approvals these days? By late I mean after first going pending.
I think it is consistent with my road edits tests reported in this series. During the road edit discussions it became clear that some more seasoned road editors like @ErmesT saw pending edits trickle in over a long period while none of my new road edits were pending longer than 5-6 days. So there can be some systematic differences.
Conclusion: I don’t think pending edits get checked by a human operator any more. It is all left to the AI as practically all edits that get approved are approved immediately.
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