Hi guys, let’s discuss options of harmonising chains on this card.
A few points worth noting:
the search function values alternative names a lot even though they remain invisible in the app
search results show the street and city which helps picking a result
short POI names remain visible on the map for longer (depending on how crowded the surroundings are)
See attachments below for example search results for “Aldi Ashbourne” Or “Tesco Ashbourne” - I was abroad at the time of the screenshots and I was expecting to see 1 Mega Meter for this distance :mrgreen: :lol:
I think a great start. A couple of ideas on the list:
Include categories and possible alternative, for the ones so far they are relatively simple but you start getting into the challenges of coffee shops do you want to include they are a bakery. McDonald’s is fast food but some chain might be considered restaurants.
Add a note column
I like the utilizing the chain’s store name as an alternative, as the primary name will show in the map if it is an area and “Aldi” is cleaner than “Aldi Ashbourne” on the map.
My understanding is currently you are following the UK practice on Places Area vs Point. Do you want to define these harmonized places category on this list? The USA defines all categories. This might be a different discussion altogether for the Area vs Point topic.
Another consideration is creating this in a google sheet, easier to update and you could also embed it into a Wazeopedia page.
Do you want submissions to be via the forum or a google form (could go into a separate tab on the sheet)
I have a couple of chains that I was thinking of suggesting, Ill post them a little later.
Great idea with the Google Sheets. I created the file, linked it in the first post as read-only for now, and also included columns for Categories, Type, and Lock. I wasn’t aware we can embed them in Wazeopedia and that’s great news because tables in the forum and Wazeopedia are rather hard to manage.
Submissions at the moment in this post; if the feedback is overwhelming we’ll consider a form.
My own preference is only to have the type of store for supermarkets, e.g. Tesco Metro or just Supervalu, rather than the town or location name as well. It gets a bit unwieldy otherwise. The street and town will always appear in the search results, as seen in Yanis’s screenshot, so you will have reassurance that you are going to the right one. Tesco Metro Ashbourne could be an alternative name.
For hotels, its always helpful to have the full name as given by the hotel, Jurys Inn Parnell Street.
In the past, I’ve named supermarkets without the type but with the location (eg “Tesco Ashbourne”), and I don’t care that much for the type (eg Metro/Extra/whatever).
Looking just now, I find the information shown in search results (for “Tesco”, for example) to be not all that useful when the location name isn’t included, but I probably need to fiddle with it some more.
One thing I need to check out (to firm up my opinion) is what Carplay shows in search results - it might not be as useful as what’s shown on the phone. I’ll check at the weekend and report back…
About the spreadsheet: Yanis, can you enable suggestions? The chain name for Aldi is “Aldi”, not “ALDI”.
For road interchanges: I think I prefer “M/Nxx Jnn” or “M/Nxx Jnn / M/Nyy Jmm” rather than using the alternate name, because nobody (except for road engineering staff ) ever navigates to an interchange - all we care about here is what we show on screen.
The locality might be useful if there are more than one places in the same town, or if the road name is blank and the town isn’t adding much info either.
It would be interesting to see how Android Auto shows stuff. I’ve never ever used it myself, haven’t even seen it in action.
Actual chain name for Aldi is ALDI - that’s how they call themselves. Not sure I get you here.
On the suggestions, do you not think this thread is enough for now?
Edit: btw, Google has some really funny anonymous emojis nowdays:
Localization for chains can be difficult. Sometimes it is enough for people to see the address when they click on a result. Sometimes one needs more of a name for the place to be better prepared to pick the right location.
Examples Aldi (Website and twitter in text format refers itself as “Aldi” despite their logo being all caps “ALDI”, interestingly in the USA they do have more consistent usage of the all caps). Much of the time the address or distance from you will be adequate to pick the correct Aldi.
Looking at Tesco (Similar case where the logo is all caps but in text they refer to themselves as Tesco on their website). I am not familiar with the different brands of Tesco stores. Quickly looking at their website reveals many types, but when I look at their store fronts they seam to have little differences.
Which actually brings up my first suggested place
Maldron Hotels - Name: Maldron Hotels - (Location Name), Category: Hotel, A/P: Area Place, Website: https://www.maldronhotels.com/
@John I saw your request for comments on the spreadsheet and changed the settings of the link in post #1 to allow comments for all.
I’ll avoid quoting images below.
All Tescos are owned by the same company (no franchising) so the only difference is size which comes with products availability, car park size (or presence), etc. The “grades” express, metro, superstore, extra, and I coincidentally realised the one you linked was missing so I added that.
As a sidenote, we’re naming the first segment of large parking lots, and for POIs in a shopping centre like the above this could be added as the address. Making this particular example look like this:
Interesting view from a visitor’s eyes. We would rarely have a hotel in Dublin as our destination so thanks for the input.
For the Dublin Airport one, it’s visible in the address (as a city). Wouldn’t that be sufficient for the search results?
That said, it’s probably better to add location names for hotels in general. I’ll add your suggestion in to the list. Just one thing on the URL I find them easier to the eye as short as possible so I’d suggest to go with https://maldronhotels.com. Any thoughts?
When I searched for “Tesco Ashbourne” with Waze running in Carplay I got two results: the one in Ashbourne, and the one in Wicklow town (which is weird, because it’s certainly not the closest Tesco to me). I tried to take a screenshot, but a combination of not being able to remember the buttons to press for a screenshot and knocking the USB cable (and disconnecting the phone from the car) put paid to that.
I’m starting to lean strongly in favour of having the location name as part of the primary Place name.
The name in the logo appears in all caps, yes, but it originated as a an abbreviation (not an acronym, so no need to capitalise) of “Albrecht Diskont”.
On their Irish website, their name appears almost always just as “Aldi”, and the company name is “Aldi stored (Ireland) Limited”. Showing it in capitals just looks wrong to me.
The UK site uses “Aldi” too, but the Germans sites for both Aldi Süd (the version we have in Ireland) and Aldi Nord use “ALDI”. The US and Australian sites (those countries also both have Aldi Süd) use “ALDI”.
In my opinion we should use the formatting the local (Irish) company uses: “Aldi”.
It’s might be a bit confusing what Android Auto did there. Maybe it’s suggesting local matches because it assumes you’re ready to drive (because you’re in a car).
One more thing to consider, is that if we add the locality we’ll end up with towns looking like a canvas of their own name - Ashbourne Garda, Tesco Ashbourne, Lidl Ashbourne, Aldi Ashbourne, Dunnes Ashbourne etc. The town name will repeat multiple times in the app when the only useful element is the brand.
I agree with you on the Waze POI name.
We should probably take a minute and clarify the “Actual chain name” column in general. I believe this column should show how a place appears on their logo (as it’s identifiable by the people). There are many examples where chains have their logo in all UPPER or all lower case, but use Proper Case in text. We’re aiming to use Proper Case in the “Waze POI name” column.
Good point! I find (in Carplay anyway; I almost never use Waze on the phone by itself, although I imagine the majority of users do) that only a small number of Places show up on the screen (and Waze on Carplay is a bit weird in that regard too: it often shows one or two obscure places prominently and doesn’t show others unless they’re quite close).
More experimenting required. I’ve renamed several supermarkets near me to just their name (+rank, for Tesco) - so just “Tesco Superstore”, “Lidl”, “Aldi”, “Supervalu”, etc, with the place name as part of the alternative name (“Tesco Greystones”, “Lidl Greystones”, “Aldi Greystones”, etc…)
After the next tile update I’ll check out how it looks/works in the client (both with and without Carplay)
A couple more things I realised while reviewing how items look in the search results that show as you type (before hitting enter):
if Google POIs are linked as external providers, only the Waze POI will appear
when a POI is inside a shopping centre or a retail park, it’s street address should be the shopping centre. We usually have the entry parking lot roads named as such so it’s already there.
@David, did you get a chance to test Android Auto more?
Not on Android Auto (I don’t have an Android phone), but I did try over the weekend with Apple Carplay. It worked fine for all but one of the supermarket chains in Greystones (Tesco, Aldi, Lidl and Supervalu) but one of them (I forget which) didn’t show the location in the search list. This is odd, because they all have an address in WME.
One annoying thing about Carplay is that the list of search results only has room for one item at a time (although you can scroll through it) because the on-screen keyboard takes up almost all of the screen. Maybe I need a better car with a bigger screen I’ll try to take screenshots next time I’m in the car.
More usefully, I’ll also try again next time in the car and see which of the four supermarket chains didn’t quite work right.
Carplay, I have to remind myself that some people don’t use Android
As I’ve harmonised a few places around me for the sake of testing, I’m thinking the primary name might be more important in search results than visually in the app. And there’s loads of space vacant (at least on my screen).
My current position is that I prefer having the location name (town/suburb) as part of the Place name. This is because (on Carplay anyway), the space for the address is very small, so in the search results, we get something like (sorry, I don’t have a screenshot):
Tesco Superstore
5.2km | R123 Some…
…where the road name in the Place address could be “R123 Somename Rd” - however, unless the user knows the area very well, they might have no idea what or where “R123 Somename Rd” is, and even less of an idea if it’s truncated aggressively into a very short space. When I’m trying to find somewhere, I know vaguely that there’s a Tesco in (for example) Baldoyle, so I want the search results to show me the Baldoyle Tesco, but I might not know what the road names in that area are and I want to be able to tell which Tesco in the search results is the Baldoyle one.
For the above reason, I think we should append the town/suburb name to the Place name, so we’d have “Tesco Superstore Baldoyle” in the example above.
On Carplay, this would show in the search results as:
Tesco Superstore Baldoyle
5.2km | R123 Some…
Tesco Balgriffin
7.2km | Mumble…
Tesco Express Inchicore
9.9km | R321 Kilmain…
On a different but related note: typically supermarkets and similar businesses are in a small shopping centre with a few other shops. Because of this, I think they should be mapped as point Places (along with the other businesses there), and there should be an area Place for the entire shopping centre. This way, the user will see the shopping centre on the map display, and not think that the only thing there is the supermarket (or similar).
The only exception to this would be when there a supermarket (or similar) is the only thing at that location, which does happen occasionally. In that case, I think it should be mapped as an area Place.
I’m aligned with you on the naming so I’ve adjusted the spreadsheet accordingly.
For the type, I agree that most venues should be points, so I’ll add another entry to the list “Depends*”
*=Point by default, but can be Area if the store is large and standalone (not in a shopping/retail park).
The only outstanding bit in the file at the moment is the category for the likes of Mr Price/Dealz/Choice who. Convenience store isn’t an exact match, but I thought that might be the closest possible.
) ever navigates to an interchange - all we care about here is what we show on screen.
