Improved Map Launches Next Week
Mapping your downtown is about to get a lot easier.
Recently a number of the downtowns that use Citiesense to manage their community’s data shared new maps to keep everyone updated about the changes to businesses operating in their area.
These are changes that only a local organization and its community members are able to keep tabs on. Google Maps and other third parties are only now starting to get caught up on the new hours of operation, but the services and products offered storefront to storefront are, by and large completely wrong on most online information outlets.
At Citiesense we strive to assist our downtown partners as they work daily to help their communities share accurate up-to-date information, as it becomes available in real time. With this part of our mission in mind, I’m excited to share some updates we’ve been working on for the past month. We’re about to release a new mapping interface to help our downtowns manage and share their community’s data.
As you read on, I think you’ll see these updates as obvious improvements. We’ve known we needed to make these changes for a while now. It’s great to see them finally going live, particularly at this time when so many of our downtowns are relying on Citiesense to keep their communities informed with critical information that’s changing fluidly day to day.
So, with that said, do you like working with your data visually and seeing it on the map? Great! We do too. :) And we wanted to make all of our lives easier. Here’s what we did.
The main improvement comes for looking up records, which is a major part of any user’s workflow using a map. Think of the last time you used Google Maps.. I’m willing to bet you were looking up businesses around you. Our current interface for interacting with your map records requires us to jump between several features — 3 to be precise. We have (1) Keyword Search, (2) List View, and (3) Location Details
Let’s say you want to lookup one of your records — i.e. “Starbucks”.. Here’s how that goes for you right now:
So clearly we had an opportunity to simplify this. Here’s a look at your new 3 in 1 component for this same workflow:
3 in 1 — This new component combines (1) Keyword Search, (2) List View, and (3) Location Details into a single, more seamless sidebar experience. We’ve added a few other shortcuts as well. Plus, you can expand and collapse the component to free up more space:
As always, we love working on tools to help you improve your community’s capability to work with data about your neighborhood. Our goal is to make your daily workflows faster and more convenient so you can all focus more time on your neighborhood and spend less time puzzling over how to work with your community’s data online.
For those of you using Citiesense right now, we hope you will find the new tools more intuitive. Please reach out with questions and feedback. It’s always great to hear from you.
