I was very excited when Google Streetview was finally released in the UK back in March 2009. After posting about the discovery I explored a bit and found out that every house I have lived in can be virtually visited! However, these virtual trips also made me aware of how clunky the interface for moving a long a street was. Shuffling along was fine for short distances and it was easy to drop into another street but it was a pain to relocate to a point that was in view but half-way down the road.

There has now been another update and hovering the mouse further along the road shows a circular shape, which I have seen referred to as a magic donut. Double-clicking zooms you to that point, which is a much more intuitive interface. A similar mechanism allows zooming in on specific points of the image.

I think this is a very useful enhancement to what was already a handy tool and demonstrates how there is often scope for small refinements to make a site much better.

Technorati Tags:

google

maps

user interface