The New Map Maker Review Experience: A Closer Look

[Lori Savageau]

Hello Mappers!

With the holiday visitors on their way, it’s time to make you neighborhood maps as accurate as they can be. Today, Google Map Maker is introducing a new Review Experience, making it easier than ever to review edits by other mappers in your areas of expertise, and ensure the best local maps possible.

Where to begin?
Simply select a neighborhood of interest, then click on the To Review tab on the left hand panel to see a list of pending edits in your neighborhood of choice. By default, you’ll see changes from any areas that you’ve added to your Neighborhood Stream. You can also select specific neighborhoods or view changes in the current map view.

You’ll recognize pending edits by these handy yellow markers.

What’s new?

With the new reviewing panel, we have done our best to make the review process more efficient, intuitive and engaging. Specific changes are as follows:

• Edits that are open for review are filtered, ranked based on ease of reviewing - more complicated edits are ranked below

• Improved readability of changes:
• Cleaner comments stream
• Color code for different aspect of a feature. Changes are shown in yellow, deletions are shown in red, and the original is shown in grey

• Information about the mapper who made the change is presented along with every edit without relying on hover-over behavior

• Edits that you don't have the information to review can be now be marked as Partially or Don’t know, preventing them from reappearing in your stream

Note: The option Partially is available only for edits with multiple attribute changes. At this time, this option is unavailable for Line features.

Once you select the option Partially,  you can check the boxes to accept some aspects of the edit, while disagreeing with other aspects of the same edit.

• Many less frequently used options that were making the review process cluttered have now been removed

Why review edits?
When you review features that others have added or changed, you help determine which changes should stay on the map and which ones don't make the cut. You can review features edited by anyone (except your own!), helping to build stronger maps of the places you care about most.

For more information, be sure to visit our Help Center or join in discussions on the General Map Maker forum.

From all of us to all of you,

Happy Holidays and Happy Mapping!

Lori
on behalf of the entire Google Map Maker team