Thinking of making a change and making it more colorful (yet enabling to display the additional information and maintaining visibility), we’d like your view on the 2 options we are examining currently:
The ‘Yellow’ option (assuming we will not display yellow (low) traffic jams):
The ‘Greenish’ option (as we do not display roads without traffic as green):
So, please feel free to tell us your view
I like both options - on balance I think the yellow option is nicer, but it needs a little more difference between the shades per road type. It’s always good to be able to spot the difference between motorways (freeways) and Major/Minor highways. Also you could still show the low traffic jams in a vivid (but strong) yellow rather than shades of orange.
I would certainly like to see both options on my iPhone client to try to live with them.
Steve
I’ve been using the user-made scheme with Cartouche colours for a while now. I will keep using this one because it shows all (major) road types in a different colour, so they are a lot more recognizable than the different shades of the same colour as used in the current and now proposed schemes.
I was thinking about the map colors the other night. They were annoying on a long night trip but I was did not turn the brightness down either. I was thinking a more red-based scheme at night (like an airplane cockpit) would be more suitable. Also I think there a 3 types of colorblindness, and it might be good to have a scheme for each one. There should be color studies available somewhere or consult your local eye doctor. I also discovered that deer were not marked on the map. Is there some way chips can be inserted in them to warn us late at night? They can ruin an otherwise wonderful trip.
We have made our self Colourscheme for Germany.
Freeway`s are here blue, Minor Highways Yellow.
See yourself -> http://world.waze.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=75&t=3211&start=0
Best regards Erik
I’d prefer that you not waste time and resources making anything prettier until all of the numerous frustrating bugs, glitches, and errors have been fixed. Stop putting form ahead of function. If it doesn’t work, it won’t matter how it looks because no one will be looking at it.
Yeah I think map improvements are important too! A map and app has to look good to have mass appeal, but even more so from a functional perspective I am having a problem in Winnipeg that the basic Govt map data made the Primary Streets all Major Highways, not a big deal as I want to change them to Primary Streets but the problem is Primary Streets dont appear at a far enough zoom level.
To illustrate my example look at how the waze client looks on my phone for the city of Winnipeg. If I change all the major hwys to primary street, the average wazer would think there is a void inside of the ring hwy that encircles my city called the Perimeter Hwy.
http://www.photoboothweb.com/image.php?id=0720tr876n7p
compared to on the cartouche which although clunkier looking at least shows primary streets when almost the entire city of Winnipeg is viewed.
http://www.waze.com/cartouche/?zoom=0&lat=49.88768&lon=-97.11179&layers=BFTTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFTTTT
So basically I am hoping for primary streets to be more visible at further zooms so you can see the basic layout of the city using this important streets. I dont want to label these roads minor hwy or major hwy just to be visible (not that I have intentionally done so!).
Thanks,
muchski
I vote for Greenish or whichever map properly displays all four stages of traffic
Light, Moderate, Heavy, Complete Standstill AND has mass appeal.
It’s all been working pretty nicely for me. An attractive application is an application that is pleasant to use. No one wants to stare at an ugly map all day, and the more users that like it, the more users we have, and the better the maps get.
Anyway, greenish is nice! I’ve been using Tutti-frutti in the client because it’s the only one that differentiates between streets and minor highways and between minor highways and freeways. This distinction is paramount, as far as I’m concerned; I don’t even like the Tutti-frutti scheme that much 
Really? You don’t get server timeouts when requesting a route? You don’t have issues with segments folding back upon themselves when removing a junction? You don’t have any segments in your area that appear to be connected but really aren’t? Your dashboard routes are updated correctly every night? You don’t experience any of a dozen other issues everyone else is complaining about? I’d like to know how you got the bug-free version so I can get it too!
OK, but this application is a lot more than just staring at a map all day. It’s supposed to be interactive an allow you to update the map problems. But when bugs and glitches prevent you from editing correctly, or make it too frustrating to do so, all those users that came because of the pretty maps will leave.
Keep in mind that most products have multiple teams.
So yes, their might be issues on the server side, but most likely the people programming the phone application code, don’t work on the server code.
So even though you are seeing work being done on the client side, don’t think that those hours could be spent on the server side, as they most likely are unrelated jobs/skills.
Nope.
Haven’t seen it.
Be more specific?
It’s a known issue on which they are already working.
You don’t think they’re working on that? Throwing together a draft sample colour scheme takes literally five minutes.
Not really. I’d wager over 90% of waze’s users never touch the map editor. Why bother?
Look at Wikipedia. How many of Wikipedia’s users do you think have ever edited an article? Exactly.
OK, I see some of your points but the way I understood it, Waze wants to eventually make money selling updated maps. If they spend their time courting the 90% (by your guess) of users that don’t edit and just freeload, Waze will never get their maps into a marketable state and go bankrupt.
I think they need to put down the color crayons and fix the problems that are driving away the map editors. Sure there may be different teams of developers, but when there are so many obvious and frustrating problems they may have to reallocate the coloring team to the bug fixing team in order to create a viable product.
But then again, if you’re happy with things they way they are, I may just be too picky and need to go somewhere else where they’ll appreciate my months of hard work instead of pandering to the 0day n00bs by giving them new pretty colors and shiny road goodies.
Ontopic: I like the green better, although I manually changed the default theme to the night theme on my phone, I like the dark better 
Offtopic: I got to agree with Hallmike and some of the others, it sometimes looks (and I am not saying it is actually like this as I cannot see behind the scenes, I already found out the Waze team is much bigger than it appears at the outside but I don’t know about this for sure) as if there is more done about the looks of the app than the actual functionality.
I can honestly name too many things that need to be improved, before the app will actually really be usable. For myself, whenever I drive I usually have Waze on, but for the actual routing I have to use a standalone GPS device that can actually find the locations I need to go (if I don’t know where I have to be). This is, for example, because more than 90% of the houses here in Hawaii do not have house numbers within Waze yet and I wish I could add them but we cannot add dashes in the house number which most of the house numbers have over here and I don’t feel much for doing things twice. Because of this, many locations cannot be found yet and therefore it becomes unusable for many people. And there are many more examples I could give that needs to be improved. I don’t think it is so weird to think that people who try the app might actually walk out and go for something else because this app is not finished yet.
Like said, I’m sure things are being worked on behind the scene, but this is something we cannot tell. I have the feeling the Waze team is bigger than most expect, maybe it would be a good idea to show the users here how many people work on Waze, for example. be more open and show us some insights. I have to agree with the others, right now it kind of looks as if more work is being put into the look and feel or Waze and like nothing much is being done to the issues that needs to be addressed in order to have a working app and that is a bit sad because I really feel that Waze could become a very big thing if things are done right.
Some more offtopic: Personally, I think good looks and, more than that, a good readability of the map is a key feature for any navigation app. I like the yellow style best.
That said, in my opinion the colors of the clients are, while not shiny and hip, quite ok. It’s the Live Map that is really ugly, i.e. the map that most prospective users will see first. Not only the colors, it’s also garbled with far too many city names when zoomed out, making serious orientation impossible, and often small villages are named whereas big cities are not.
On the other hand, I personally couldn’t care less about features like twitter or foursquare. That’s where I’d say that no development resources should be wasted.
It’s probably sth else for everyone. Still, I think solving bugs should be 1st priority, then getting rid of annoyances, then new features and good looks. But, as RallyChris already said, it’s probably not the developers, anyway, who are working on new color schemes.
Is it possible to create a small iPhone app to allow us to create our own colour schemes?
Once written, this could let the community spend the time developing colour schemes and leave the Waze team to work on the main Client. We could even have a way of uploading and sharing our own designs??
Why just iPhone? Not even the majority of people use iPhone… Sorry, not meant to attack you but there is more in the world than just Apple.
Anyways, you can make your own color schemes very easily. Just go to the Waze directory of your phone, and then to the following dir: Waze\skins\default\day (or night) and edit the schemes there with a notepad. The colors are all in html format (such as #000000 for black, for example). If you don’t know the codes, just Google those colorcodes, theyre all over the web
A directory higher, you can also add/edit your own mood pictures or like the car that is used as pointer in the GPS and so on. You can completely customize Waze if you look into it a bit
Well, yes, that’s exactly it… you can’t really look around apps like that with the iPhone unless you jailbreak.
And I would wager that the iPhone is indeed the most popular platform for waze. It certainly is in the United States.
Ok, I didn’t know that about the iPhone, I thought you were at least able to do something… can imagine you want an app for that then yeah.
As for the popularity, both Blackberry and Android are actually more populair in the US (and not together combined, but seperately) as was written in a recent research (http://www.canalys.com/pr/2010/r2010081.html).
Some numbers from that:
Android 34% (combined phone brands)
Blackberry (RIM) 32%
iPhone 22%
Both are nice looking , but if you can, try to keep sane road colours as in cartouche,