INTERFACE DESIGN

BAD INTERFACE DESIGN – WAZE APP

In the course of your daily life, you’ll often find yourself exposed to poor design choices. This can be in the form of a direct mail promotion or something much more mainstream, such as a very popular product that everyone uses. You don’t necessarily have to be sensitive to poor design to recognize it in the real world, but the outcome will be minor irritation or outright frustration. Recently I recognized this in product I use almost every time I get into my car, the Waze Navigation app.

How the Waze Navigation App delivers bad interface design.
How the Waze Navigation App delivers bad interface design.

FAIL!

I’ve been a Waze user for quite some time. It’s a simple navigation app that competes with Google/Apple Maps and provide realtime guidance for getting to your destination. It has its quirks, such as rerouting you from a highway to secondary roads to shave off a mere two minutes, but its real “Jedi Power” is alerting you to speed traps, red light camera and sneaky cop stakeouts. Utilizing the power of crowdsourcing, the app is very effective at this invaluable attribute and is why its way more popular that the other navigation apps.

However, it has a major interface flaw. It is so glaring and so irritating, I’m dumbfounded as to why it hasn’t been corrected in the dozens of updates that have occurred since its inception.

INTERFACE DESIGN

What Makes Waze Great

I’ve been a Waze user for quite some time. It’s a simple navigation app that competes with Google/Apple Maps and provide realtime guidance for getting to your destination. It has its quirks, such as rerouting you from a highway to secondary roads to shave off a mere two minutes, but its real “Jedi Power” is telling you where cops have set up speed traps. It’s very effective at this and is why its more popular that the other navigation apps available.

However, it has a major interface flaw. It is so glaring and so irritating, I’m dumbfounded as to why it hasn’t been corrected in the dozens of updates that have occurred since its inception.

What Makes Waze Bad

When using it to navigate to a destination that takes you on a highway, the size, font and color of the icon to signal an upcoming exit is completely idiotic. Getting off at the correct exit on a highway is paramount when navigating to a destination. The penalty of missing an exit can be severe. Such as having to travel and extra 20 miles and adding a significant amount of time to your trip. Yet, Waze has decided to make the exit icon, one of the smallest items on the screen. Worse, it is relegated to the upper right of the screen the farthest from the driver and is one of the smallest elements on the entire navigation interface. Even worse than its diminutive size, is the minuscule white lettering inside a light green box, meaning there’s absolutely no contrast. Therefore, not only is it small, it’s hard to read. And I have the Apple iPhone Pro Max. The biggest mobile phone that Apple makes. I can’t even image how hard to read it is on a smaller phone.
What’s even more staggering is that there is plenty of room to make it bigger. The exit icon lives inside a thick horizontal bar that goes across the top of the interface, but only uses about 40% of the vertical area. It’s an appalling interface choice. Waze could make their product remarkably better by increasing the size, changing the color, improving the contract and increasing the font size.

Now Waze my retort that they display the exit and the correct lane to be in just prior to the turnoff, but so what?  Why do users have to crane their neck and squint their eyes to see the exit number when the notification first arrives on the screen? Looking at a navigational aid is distracting enough, why make it even more so with a lousy design decision?

For such a large company* with a huge user base, it’s unacceptable that this hasn’t been corrected. However, the first step in fixing a problem is admitting you have one…

How Waze Gets Their Graphical User Interface WRONG!
Waze App GUI Fail
Waze Bad App Interface Design
How Waze Can Improve Their GUI
Look at the two images above. Which one is easier to understand? A no brainer, right?  A simple interface tweak significantly increases the readability, resulting in less distraction and users not missing their exit. In fact, this simple modification may even save lives. I’m not trying to be dramatic here, but making the interface easier to comprehend means that users will not have to take their eyes off the road for nearly as long as they may would have to view the exit number.

It’s hard to understand why Waze doesn’t change their graphical user interface (GUI) to make this modification for the good of all, but if you agree, let them know!

*Google bought Waze for $1.3 billion in 2013.

WAZE INTERFACE DESIGN IMPROVEMENT

Exit Notification Modification

How Waze Can Improve Their GUI

EVEN BIG COMPANIES GET IT WRONG

For Waze, a large company with a huge user base, it’s unacceptable that this hasn’t been corrected. However, the first step in fixing a problem is admitting you have one…

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