Design explosions

Jon Bell and William Van Hecke have started a blog in which they review UX designs in the wild with the purpose of learning from them. Their first episode takes apart Apple Maps and Google Maps on iOS, highlighting the differences and trying to understand the choices.

In their own words:

But this is a different kind of post. There’s no winner this time, just a bunch of design lessons inspired from studying two similar products. It’s fun to compare and contrast the approaches of two highly skilled teams working on a pretty unique design challenge.

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Every decision has a tradeoff. Every thing you make easier can make another thing harder. There is no such thing as “the right design”. But we can learn a lot from seeing how experts in their field weighed the pros and cons of different approaches.