User-Unfriendly Behavior
Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2012 3:51 am
Waze is a cool app with great potential but it has a number of mal-features that have persisted through several releases and either seem like inability to respond to feedback or UI features designed by programmers because they think they would be cool and don't have to live with them.
In the area of persistent bugs (despite previous reports), the popup notifications for traffic cameras do not honor the settings. Even though I have notifications for cameras disabled in settings, I get alerts for them all along my route to and from work. I know where these cameras are, the alerts are just a distraction. The voice notifications for stop light cameras can't be disabled either, except by totally disabling voice for everything, which is counterproductive because then you don't get voice alerts for accidents along the route. Even disabling voice alerts doesn't totally work because it interrupts a bluetooth music player connection without saying anything - it's as though it tries to say something and then realizes after it already suspended the bluetooth music player that it isn't supposed to do it. This issue with stop light cameras is extremely annoying and almost enough on its own to make me give up on the app.
Every morning it pops up a dialog asking me if I'm driving to work and tries to turn on navigation. Same on return in the evening "Looks like you're driving home..." This is probably the one area of my life where I (and most people) don't need any help. It feels like a "clever" feature thought up by a programmer without any reality check. The only way to disable this is to disable the "auto learning" feature completely which seems silly. After I've dismissed this popup a few days in a row, WAZE ought to get the message and stop presenting it every morning .When I want help with navigation, I will tell WAZE so. If I DO say yes to the "Looks like you're driving to work" dialog, WAZE makes it clear that it doesn't "learn" anything from my past driving. It persistently tries to take me by a different route (and not a smart one either) than the one I've been driving every single day since I first started using WAZE.
Another thing which I've seen a lot of comments about is the endless popups for accidents, traffic jams, etc. that are not along my route and sometimes are much farther away than the "radius" I've specified in settings. This has not gotten better in the latest version and actually seems to be worse than it was before. Often these notifications are for things that are miles away to the side of my route or even behind me along my route. These are really no help at all. If WAZE can't limit these notifications to your current direction of travel along your route and within the radius in settings, we should just get rid of these. It's really enough to just display this stuff on the map and let you touch the little icon to get more information on a specific problem.
The icons for WAZERs that are off the road but forgot to switch WAZE off (presumably in their homes watching the football game) are just clutter on the screen. WAZE should not display the location of WAZERS that are clearly off any documented roadway or have been (relatively) stationary for say, more than 15 minutes. Again, this has been mentioned repeatedly in this forum with no response.
In the area of persistent bugs (despite previous reports), the popup notifications for traffic cameras do not honor the settings. Even though I have notifications for cameras disabled in settings, I get alerts for them all along my route to and from work. I know where these cameras are, the alerts are just a distraction. The voice notifications for stop light cameras can't be disabled either, except by totally disabling voice for everything, which is counterproductive because then you don't get voice alerts for accidents along the route. Even disabling voice alerts doesn't totally work because it interrupts a bluetooth music player connection without saying anything - it's as though it tries to say something and then realizes after it already suspended the bluetooth music player that it isn't supposed to do it. This issue with stop light cameras is extremely annoying and almost enough on its own to make me give up on the app.
Every morning it pops up a dialog asking me if I'm driving to work and tries to turn on navigation. Same on return in the evening "Looks like you're driving home..." This is probably the one area of my life where I (and most people) don't need any help. It feels like a "clever" feature thought up by a programmer without any reality check. The only way to disable this is to disable the "auto learning" feature completely which seems silly. After I've dismissed this popup a few days in a row, WAZE ought to get the message and stop presenting it every morning .When I want help with navigation, I will tell WAZE so. If I DO say yes to the "Looks like you're driving to work" dialog, WAZE makes it clear that it doesn't "learn" anything from my past driving. It persistently tries to take me by a different route (and not a smart one either) than the one I've been driving every single day since I first started using WAZE.
Another thing which I've seen a lot of comments about is the endless popups for accidents, traffic jams, etc. that are not along my route and sometimes are much farther away than the "radius" I've specified in settings. This has not gotten better in the latest version and actually seems to be worse than it was before. Often these notifications are for things that are miles away to the side of my route or even behind me along my route. These are really no help at all. If WAZE can't limit these notifications to your current direction of travel along your route and within the radius in settings, we should just get rid of these. It's really enough to just display this stuff on the map and let you touch the little icon to get more information on a specific problem.
The icons for WAZERs that are off the road but forgot to switch WAZE off (presumably in their homes watching the football game) are just clutter on the screen. WAZE should not display the location of WAZERS that are clearly off any documented roadway or have been (relatively) stationary for say, more than 15 minutes. Again, this has been mentioned repeatedly in this forum with no response.