Brad Maglinger, MapQuest’s chief marketing officer, compared the reboot that began two years ago to razing a house rather than remodeling. Many tech workers were hired.
The company also began a low-budget tour of America — the MapQuest Listening Tour, product vice president Nate Abbott called it. A handful of MapQuest employees met with users in cities from the District to Los Angeles, watching how they used the app and the Web site. Other employees walked the streets of downtown Denver, ducking into coffee shops and offering a $5 gift card to everyone who’d sit down and share their user experiences.
Those conversations — though unscientific — helped give the company a set of common-sense ways to improve the experience, MapQuest officials said. One woman, for instance, said she worried about driving the wrong way down a one-way street, and MapQuest realized there was a better way to mark such roads. When the mobile app was introduced in late-2013, one-way streets were more easily identifiable, marked like the vanes of a bird feather.
“It’s a quick, small change,” Abbott said.
Of course, it’s also noteworthy what MapQuest is not doing. Its maps have no 3D views of buildings, no put-you-there images of streets. In its digital cities, buildings are traced in outline but aren’t marked “Starbucks” or “White House.”
The mobile app is now vector-based (which keeps images crisp when re-sized) and has received good reviews from tech outlets. But its Web page, viewed on laptops or desktops, hasn’t been updated and looks much as it did six years ago. During a recent demo at the MapQuest office, SuAnne Hall, the company’s design director, groaned lightly as she used her MacBook to chart directions for driving from Denver to Los Angeles — 16 hours and 33 minutes. She noted one of the features she likes: One can easily locate the coffee shops or hotels along the way. But the widgets — or user interfaces — are clunky, she said, and the map is grainy.
MapQuest’s tech team has been working for more than a year on a new Web version. It will be ready in the next few months.
“This map,” Hall said, “still needs a lot of love.”
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