User Interface of the Day #3: Flashearth

Design UI Design Fundamentals

Today the Humanoids review flashearth.com: a Web app that uses satellite and aerial imagery from Yahoo, Google and other Websites to enable you to view the world’s surface from the comfort of your easy chair or desk. If you’ve ever wondered what the Sahara, your childhood home, Chicago, or any other destination looks like from the skies, use flashearth.com and find out. Here’s what we have to say on this app’s UI:

Andrew Wilson

What’s Cool: I was astounded by my ability to navigate. And I appreciate that this app doesn’t take you to your destination so quickly that you can’t see anything else in the surrounding area. Once I located an object, it was relatively easy to find it again. For instance, I looked for Aza’s house in California, found it, then zoomed out, subconsciously picking out the landmarks so that when I tried to find Aza’s house again, I did so in just two strokes.

What’s Not Cool: The compass was anti-helpful in navigation. Also, there’s no way to recover the help, which seems silly — the creator used the right mouse-button menu to accomplish other things.

So? This app and its style of navigation should be a model design for Google Maps or Yahoo Maps.

Atul Varma

What’s Cool: Overall, I really do like this better than Google Maps. The crosshairs in the center, which explicitly indicate the center of zooming, are really nice.

What’s Not Cool: GE handles zoom smoothly–if you zoom in really fast, it uses the data it has to provide a very blurry but smoothly-moving image. Flashearth seems to load up all the intermediate data to provide an accurate picture throughout the entire zoom, even if I want to jump from one zoom level to another very quickly. For example, I tried to use the slider to put it to the max when looking at Chicago, and it still tried to load up all of the intermediate data, which caused “chunking” on my computer. Google Earth would say, “I’m just going to use the data I have right now and get new data once the user stops zooming.” However, this may be a misperception on my part; my computer may just be slow with Flash.

So? It would have been nice to have some sort of undo ability regarding where you’re focusing, so that you could go back to where you were before.

Aza Raskin

What’s Cool: If Google Maps were stairs, Flashearth would be an escalator: Everything glides smoothly as you zoom in and out, and there is no sense of discrete zoom levels. Navigation is simply effortless in this beautiful implementation of a ZUI. Google needs to see that Flashearth is better, and buy it. To add to the praise, Flashearth even remembers were you last were, so you can instantly pick up where you left off. System state is important user input, and more applications need to follow Flashearth’s lead in not throwing it away.

What’s Not Cool: Very little about this app is uncool.

So? Amazing! Well worth your time to play with and learn from. I’d be interested in a variable speed zoom, as proposed by Brett Victor; as of now, you can only zoom at one speed. Also, I’d be interested in a more useful search. Perhaps an incremental search based on place name, so that if you’re pointing near Chicago and type “City Hall,” Flashearth would perform a spatial search around where you are pointing to find the most relevant city hall. I’d also like the ability to zoom in on the current pointer location instead of always in the center of the screen.

Jono DiCarlo

What’s Cool: After just a few minutes of playing with Flashearth, I saw an image on another web page and tried to zoom in on it by pointing to it and moving the mouse scroll wheel up. I was momentarily surprised when it didn’t work. Flashearth’s zooming/scrolling interface is so natural that it’s literally habit-forming.

What’s Not Cool: I spent a long time zooming in on Brazil and looking at deforestation patterns in the Amazon. That’s not cool at all. It’s quite depressing. That’s not Flashearth’s fault, though. My only complaints about the interface are that the search box isn’t very helpful, and that the compass rose doesn’t seem to have any other purpose besides making me dizzy.

So? Twenty years ago, an application just like this one was far-fetched enough to be described at length in the cyberpunk novel, “Snow Crash.” Now, it’s so commonplace that we can discuss the merits and flaws of competing implementations. It’s an exciting time to be alive.

Lauri Apple

What’s Cool: I like how I can be either very general (”Turkey”) or precise (”4611 N. Ravenswood”) in providing an address, and the app still takes me to the right place — in most cases. The only time I had a problem was when I was searching for “Huntsville,” of which there are many (Texas, Alabama, etc.).

What’s Not Cool: This Web app is horrible for those of us who have more wanderlust than available travel funds. More seriously, though, I had trouble using this app while using Firefox on my Mac. The pointer stuck numerous times, and kept taking me back to a place that I wanted to move away from.

So? This app provides a fun, interactive and no-fuss way to learn geography. You can either use the Microsoft VE labels to find out where things are, or keep the labels off and marvel at the abstract designs displayed on the earth’s surface.

Scott Robbin

What’s Cool: I really liked how the map panels fade in, as opposed to relying on interlaced GIFs. Moving around is much less abrupt than in Google Maps.

What’s Not Cool: They could have used less transparency and more opacity on the navigation pieces, which currently blend too much into the background. Also, if you search for the wrong address, the indicator telling you so turns white and then goes away; it would be nice to have a message that grabs your attention more effectively, and that tells you that it encountered a problem (red text might work well, for example).

So? Overall, I was really impressed with this site. Some of the other mapping programs could really take cues from this interface to create a more fluid experience. Google Maps could easily implement the panel fade-in using Javascript, which would go along way in making map panning more visually pleasing.

What’s Cool: In comparison with it’s Javascript powered brothers, it never shows a blank while loading. Ever time we see a blank screen it resets our memory making it more difficult to notice differences. The TED Talk, “Dan Dennett: Can we know our own minds?” demonstrates our inability to notice these differences.

What’s Not Cool:
Details about key bindings disappear appear after the greeting screen. It is a possible to close it with the expectation that it will be available later — but it’s not.

There isn’t a way to hide/show the information display. Commands should remain commands, and content content, they should be separated. The rotating, slider zoom, changing maps, searching commands are all too far away for repetitive use. They should show/hide directly under the mouse by pressing a hotkey. According to Fitts’s law this is faster, and more ergonomic.

There is a slight delay with the zoom animation, while this gives a softness, it also lacks the snappiness needed for high loads of zooming.

It’s hard to tell you’re distance from the ground. Distance could be indicated by using multiples of ten, similar to the short film Powers of Ten (watch remix)

It lacks all of the cool functionality of direction getting, and path charting. It also is absent, traffic, street, hybrid, and road views of it’s brother Google Maps.

Lastly, it’s not software that we improve and and redistribute, nor can we study how the program works because we don’t have access to the source code.

So? Google Maps is much better because it keeps in mind the core reason we need a map, to get places. Google’s Maps does need improvements. It needs to be smoothed so that blank areas do not appear while zooming. Commands should be tucked away and accessible via a hot key, and zooming with the scroll wheel should not recenter the screen. Distance should be indicated more clearly, and key bindings should always be accessible. And all of this should be able to be improved upon and redistributed, and should allow for people to study how the program works by being able to look at the source code.

This app is very cool, but I came across one not cool detail:
When using for example nasa terra map and looking for “paris”, all I can see is a sign telling there is no image. So I have to zoom back to see the lowest resolution available image.

It would be cool in such a case to zoom back and display an available image.