The first persuasion to check out Live Local came from reading Mark Jen’s blog. My reaction was “Is that Virtual Earth? that’s ok, I’ve seen it before when it launched just a few months back, it’s pretty nice, I could wait until they figure out what they’re calling themselves”. Late last night I saw a face I know hitting at the gym on my way out who actually works on the product, he looked tired and drained. We chattered a little and when we started to talk about Live Local he suddenly lighted up with all that passion and energy telling us about the push-pins and bird’s eye. I’m no mapping enthusiaste but when someone asked me for some driving direction in Vancouver today I thought I’d give it a shot.
Here I’m tasked with getting the driving direction from one point to another with no physical address information. The direction was “driving from Richmond to Metrotown”.
I go to http://local.live.com, I recall “right-click” from the conversation last night, thanks to that I got the direction in less than a minute.
Here’s a 15 minute usage review on Live Local:
On Print page:
Great to have Print button up top with 3 Preset Print options. This is for the rushers and novice. Everything below is advanced and can be better divided out visually either by a distinguishable pane, or an expand/collapse switch collapsed by default. The theory is if you put more than a user needs to know even if you’re putting that on top, you’re wasting the user’s time to find out what he does not need.
The checkboxes for “Print the route map” and “Print the route summary” are good options.
I had wanted just to print nothing but the textual directions, without spending time to study the UI I unchecked “summary” and “route”, however I couldn’t find the switch to take off the maps within the directions. So I ended highlighting the directions, copy and pasting to a text editor in order to lose the map images, then printing that. I discovered later the checkboxes above each map in the directions, that’s good and my comment is to add a toggle-all checkbox beside the “Detail Map” column header.
Love the “Print my notes” feature at the bottom.
On the Route Summary, I’m not happy for the fact that “Start: Origin” and “End: Destination”. That is not useful. Give me the approximated address of my locations.
On Pushpins:
Again, great pushpin feature with tagging. In the future, location tagging like any other tagging will have public, buddy-based, or unshared access. Users can see what others have tagged on a given location with adjustable radius. People can find out where exactly is the house selling dope, or, Linking that up with http://Fremont.live.com you’ll get to reviews on the restaurants being tagged. Endless opportunities.
There’s a bug with the Add Pushpin dialog (or the pop-up pane on mouseover) where it can be partially buried under the Welcome pane if the window is not wide enough, which prevents typing, viewing, or clicking a link.
Sort order of the Scratch Pad – I need drag and drop to re-order the scratch pad items. And when you re-edit an item it automatically sorts to the bottom which is counter-intuitive.
On Bird’s Eye:
I was on Metrotown of Burnaby, British Columbia. I learned about the Bird’s Eye on the Welcome pane. I glanced thru the Bird’s Eye Help and couldn’t figure it out. Not until after I went to one of the Bird’s Eye locations did I finally get it. The Bird’s Eye Notification only displays when it is available. This is the discoverability issue that frequently frustrates me. Don’t hide the null ‘field’. Show it and let your user know that it is applicable but not available. Now I go back to Metrotown thru the pushpin (thank goodness I don’t need to use the back button), I comprehend that Bird’s Eye images are not available because the notification is absent. Implicit cue of absence wastes the user’s time, and often at this point the user is in a bad mood.
Others:
Useful tips on the welcome pane. It jumpstarts the user in getting actions with the right-click menu, or get driving directions.
This is certainly one of those software-make-my-days.
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