product designer

Bing Maps

If you build it, they will come.

My Role

During my time I worked as the sole UX designer leading feature exploration/definition and developing design deliverables such as wireframes, prototypes, interactions flows and crafting early information and UI concepts. I also worked in collaboration with team engineers to develop early working prototypes for user testing.

Situation

Launched in 2009, Bing Maps had seen little new visual or functional improvement since that time. While basic searches for places and directions could be done, the experience lacked appeal and was disjointed to the point that Bing Maps was losing users quickly to competing map services such as Here and Google.

We were asked to rethink the intent of our maps offering and deliver a new experience that would be familiar to current users, but built with the future in mind.

The Results

The primary result of my work involved developing a new interaction model which is implemented in the preview that allowed users to create multiple search instances within the context of the same map view and defined cross-functionality between the map layer and the results.

After a long internal beta period, the public preview launched in July 2015. You can try it out at the Bing Maps site.

Early Comps
Some of the early work I did involving reimagining the Collections feature, that led us down the path of evolving the card model and adding more contextual data.
Search card evolution
Here is a view of the search card evolution through design phases. The final version (right) which I did not design the final UI for incorporates photos from Yelp and emulates the first iteration of the card model to the left.
Bing Maps Directions UI explorations
With the evolution of the card model also came upgrading the UI of the data surfaced on cards. Here is some samples of elements from the Directions card.