Product Improvement Feature - Google Maps

Google touches countless lives around the world every day, which has helped make it one of the most successful companies in history. As someone who aspires to work there one day, I’m drawn not just to the compensation and perks, but to the extraordinary products and services they create that genuinely improve people’s lives.

The Power of Trusted Tools

I’ve found myself completely loyal to Google’s ecosystem of products. I trust no other search engines. Google Chrome is always the first browser I download on any new computer. Despite the emergence of numerous paid alternatives, nothing quite matches the collaborative capabilities of Google Docs and Google Sheets. But among all these tools, Google Maps holds a special place in my heart.

A Generation’s Perspective

As someone in their thirties, I have a unique appreciation for Google Maps that younger users might take for granted. I remember the world before digital navigation – the struggles of finding places, asking strangers for directions, facing their occasional hostility, and circling endlessly around destinations. These experiences make me deeply grateful for the navigation capabilities we now have at our fingertips.

Room for Improvement

However, as a frequent public transport user, I’ve noticed one significant opportunity for improvement in Google Maps. While the app excels in many areas, it lacks a crucial feature for public transport navigation: prominent display of the stop immediately before your destination.

You might wonder why this matters more than the destination itself. This is where the importance of user research and genuine empathy comes into play. While Google Maps offers voice navigation that can announce when your stop is approaching, many bus or train riders prefer not to use audio guidance throughout their journey. The reality of public transport is that you need to signal your intent to exit at the next stop – knowing the stop before your destination is crucial for this interaction.

The Proposed Enhancement

My suggestion is straightforward: create a clear visual hierarchy in the public transport route display that highlights the stop immediately before your destination. This information should be readily visible without requiring additional user interaction. It’s a simple change that could significantly improve the experience for public transport users.

The Product Management Lesson

This observation highlights a fundamental principle of product management: true user empathy can’t exist only on paper or in conversations. It needs to emerge from real experiences and genuine understanding of user contexts. In this case, a product designer who regularly uses public transport would likely have identified this need through their own experiences.

One powerful way to develop this understanding is through Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) with actual users. This approach helps us understand not just what users do, but why they do it and what information they need at each step of their journey.

The Broader Implications

This case study illustrates how even highly successful products can have opportunities for improvement that only become apparent through deep user empathy. It shows why product managers need to immerse themselves in the user experience, going beyond surface-level understanding to recognize the subtle but important details that can make a significant difference.

The most valuable product insights often come not from market research or competitor analysis, but from genuine, firsthand experience with the product in real-world conditions. As product managers, we need to be users first, experiencing our products as our customers do, feeling their frustrations, and celebrating their successes.

This approach to product improvement – grounded in real user experiences and genuine empathy – helps ensure that we’re not just building features for features’ sake, but truly enhancing the user experience in meaningful ways. Sometimes, the most impactful improvements come not from revolutionary changes, but from careful attention to the small details that make a big difference in users’ daily lives.