Maps are troublesome
It’s been a little over 7 months now since the ideation of Beepyo, since then we’ve ran into numerous obstacles and changes. With all the development mishaps, changes in functionality, and scaling back; we’re finally starting to wrap things up. With so many moving pieces during development, things can easily get overlooked. I wanted to share a recent story about how a simple map feature turned into an long discussion.
When implementing our maps feature, we wanted to allow our users to know where the other users were located, but at the same time protect the privacy of their location. We felt that using their exact address would be to risky and could cause a immediate drop off rate if users knew others could access their location, so we turned to just using just city and zip.
After implementing this feature we ran into the problem of having all the cursors stacking up on top of one another, causing the map to essentially become useless. We’ve found that CraigsList uses zip and city for their maps as well, here’s their work around.
This of course, was an option for us, but how useful would a map be for large cities like Los Angeles if all requests were grouped into one window? This would essentially be a replica of our community feed.
Our goal was to provide a map that would show a general location of where a user was located, without disclosing their address. How can this be done?
Airbnb provides a similar concept to what we were thinking of doing.
But with a goal of several users in one area, how would a map with overlapping circles make any sense? it wouldn’t.
We decided to add an offset to their location, but instead of using a circle we’d use a cursor to indicate the general area of which a user was located.
All-in-all I’m glad that as a team, we were able to come up with a decision on how to effectively implement an effective map feature into Beepyo.
Thanks for reading!
