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This is super cool! I particularly like that you render the route along transit lines to reach each destination, which is differentiated from other isochrone maps I've seen. I would love to use this while hunting for apartments in a large city. I do think there are a number of things you could do to improve the UX here. Hope this doesn't come across as too harsh, but here are some suggestions... 1. Double-click to set origin makes sense, but hover to set a destination is a bit weird, for two reasons:
a. There's no way to "lock" a destination by clicking, so I can't pick a route I want to see and fix my view on it. The UI feels jittery as a result.
b. In some cases (I'm looking at NYC), loading the route to the hovered destination hangs for several seconds. I don't know if this is just an issue because your server is overloaded, but it's a weird state to be in. I'd consider: 1) adding a loading state when the route to the destination is being computed, 2) enable clicking a point to lock viewing that route, 3) maybe disabling the hover interaction entirely, though if it were performant, it would be pretty nice to have. 2. The "arrival time" concept is a slightly odd. I'd prefer to just see the amount of time it'll take to get to a destination, rather than an arrival time based on a particular starting time. I don't think anyone's going to use this to plan a specific route at a specific time; instead, they'll use it to explore locations of interest, and explore how long it'll take to get to various destinations. I see you show the trip duration in the bottom-left, but having it be an arrow pointing to a gradient spectrum is much harder to parse than just saying "27 minutes". 3. The fade effect on the side panel is a bit weird. It does draw more attention to the map, but the side panel is still occluding my view, and having it faded just makes the text very hard to read. I'd consider making it un-faded, but adding some way to collapse it. |
1. Yes I think "locking" makes sense. The entire action of viewing the paths to different destinations still needs to be polished up, especially for the mobile version as well. When I tried it before posting to HN it was instant (30ms) but now it seems to be extra laggy because the CPU is maxed. I just upgraded the server from 4 -> 16 cpus, so let's hope that does something haha.
2. 100%
3. Agree as well. I chose the easiest solution when developing (and I also develop on a large monitor so it's harder to notice the occlusion), but adding a hide toggle would certainly have been better.