14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’ search/decision engine is advancing constantly to the next level, most recently through the delivery of the summer update, but additional Cloud offerings under the Bing brand are also being upgraded as a part of the overall evolution. Case in point: Bing Maps, which now features an overhauled map experience for users. The Redmond company has been testing a new look and feel for Bing Maps content over the past several weeks, having permitted some 10% of users to get a taste of the revamped experience. Now the new Bing Maps is available for all users.
“We’re releasing it to everyone. The new map type has two experiences that differ between the AJAX version of Bing Maps and the Silverlight experience. The AJAX maps are rendered completely as a new set of map tiles and displayed through the AJAX interface as we do our current road and aerial map types. The Silverlight experience is a little different…and, this is where it gets interesting,” revealed Chris Pendleton, the Bing Maps Technical Evangelist for Microsoft.
As far as the Silverlight flavor of Bing Maps goes, the software giant has definitely kicked the user experience to a whole new level. Users with Silverlight enabled visiting Bing Maps will be able to see that the mapping content is delivered through a symbiosis of raster tiles AND vector graphics. The maps are rendered in the browser at run time, Pendleton explained.
“Well, yes, by default on the Silverlight site you can see the same tiles you see on the AJAX site only in Deep Zoom greatness. However, there’s a beta option to try the new base map with neighborhoods hovering over them as text, which we call dynamic labels. The dynamically labeled neighborhoods are clickable and will zoom you down to the respective region making it easier to further explore an area or neighborhood of a city. We’re just peeling away at the onion one data layer at a time. And, you’ll see these maps start to spread across Bing such as our Local Search,” he promised.
The new Bing Maps UX will certainly need a tad of getting used to. There are new colors, tones, nuances, shades, etc. Some aspects of the new perspective delivered by Microsoft are bound not to be easy on the eyes, especially related to the way that the data floating over the maps itself manages to intersect/overlap, at times becoming illegible. However, there’s nothing that a good “deep zoom” cannot fix, for users that will find they have problems distinguishing the info presented to them.
Pendleton enumerated some of the aspects associated with the latest stage in the evolution of Bing Maps:
“- Cool colors visually recede allowing warmer overlays to come forward - An elegant backdrop for information delivery and helps content ‘pop’ on the map - Road color provides greatest differentiation scientifically from red, yellow, green traffic overlays. - De-saturation on zoom allows more continuous transition to photographic material (Aerial, Birdseye, Streetside) and allows user to focus on street level detail better. - Designed to work in black and white and to be differentiated by those with the most common forms of color blindness - Crisp/easy to read font, larger font corresponds to larger roads - Lower cognitive load – Less data / clearer details - Improved international coverage: Data updates deliver improved road and street detail across Central & Eastern Europe, Middle East, Oceania and Asia.”
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