Designing Google Maps by Nathan Yau.
From the post:
Google Maps is one of Google’s best applications, but the time, energy, and thought put into designing it often goes unnoticed because of how easy it is to use, for a variety of purposes. Willem Van Lancker, a user experience and visual designer for Google Maps, describes the process of building a map application — color scheme, icons, typography, and “Googley-ness” — that practically everyone can use, worldwide.
I don’t normally disagree with anything Nathan says, particularly about design but I have to depart from him on why we don’t notice the excellence of Google Maps.
I think we have become accustomed to its excellence and since we don’t look elsewhere (most of us), then we don’t notice that it isn’t commonplace.
In fact for most of us it is a universe with one inhabitant, Google Maps.
That takes a lot of very hard work and skill.
The question is do you have the chops to make your topic map of one or more infoverses the “only” inhabitant, by user choice?