Unified Map Design of Bing Maps and Nokia

Last year, we entered into a strategic partnership with Nokia which included plans to offer a unique and compelling mapping experience for our customers. Since then we’ve been working with Nokia and Windows Phone to deliver a unified map style based on one set of design principles with the goal of providing a more intuitive and pleasing online mapping experience. Our Bing Maps designers teamed closely with our partners at Nokia Maps and the Windows Phone team to unify our map elements, improve contrast and usability to ultimately create a more beautiful and functional map. Today we’re excited to share the new map design, available on desktop and mobile versions of Bing and Nokia maps.

Let’s take a closer look at the updates.

Common color palette for road map style
We’ve updated our color palette to create a cleaner and consistent view of roads and landmarks resulting in a map that’s easier to interpret. For instance, the new road color is further clarified from rivers while not competing with traffic colors or overlaid information.

Celebrate Typography

We focused significantly on improving various typography components in order to provide further clarity on maps including font updates, improved readability and contextual labeling. Type size hierarchy further delineates classes of labels. The user watches city names consistently grow and become more transparent through the zoom levels. Small type is demystified from its surroundings with a technique that reduces clutter instead of adding glows or ever-present strokes. The right use of typography helps our customers consume mapping details more quickly.

Using Visual Hierarchy to create Focus and maintain context

At each level, there’s an appropriate amount of information conveyed to the user. Too little or too much information can lead to overload and thereby an unpleasant user experience. We’ve redesigned with this in mind, so a very different level of information is presented to you when you zoom compared to when you pan out. Go in for detail, pull back for context. We strive to keep the orientation and context of a user within the map surface persistent across various levels of zoom.

In addition to our map design updates, we’re also adding a significant amount of mapping coverage and data due to our partnership with Nokia and NavTeq. Each map data refresh from NavTeq brings with it many improvements, and each one also attempts to include as many new roads/subdivisions/ changes/etc. as possible.  This update is no exception and the changes are too vast to list but most notably, there are a few entire countries that really improved including Egypt, Israel, Malta, Philippines, Uruguay and Venezuela to name a few.

All in all, we believe that the new map styles available on Bing Maps (http://www.bing.com/maps) and Nokia Maps (http://maps.nokia.com) and on your mobile device are easy, satisfying, and truly a delight to use.

The New Android Market for Phones

 

[This post is by Eric Chu, Android Developer Ecosystem. —Dirk Dougherty]

Earlier this year, we launched several important features aimed at making it easier to find great applications on Android Market on the Web. Today, we’re very excited to launch a completely redesigned Android Market client that brings these and other features to phones.

The new Market client is designed to better showcase top apps and games, engage users with an improved UI, and provide a quicker path to downloading or purchasing your products. For developers, the new Android Market client means more opportunities for your products to be merchandised and purchased.

In the home screen, we’ve created a new promotional page that highlights top content. This page is tiled with colorful graphics that provide instant access to featured apps and games. The page also lets users find their favorite books and movies, which will help drive even more return visits to Market.

To make it fun and easy for users to explore fresh content, we’ve added our app lists right to the Apps and Games home pages. Users can now quickly flip through these lists by swiping right or left, checking out what other people are downloading in the Top Paid, Top Free, Top Grossing, Top New Paid, Top New Free, and Trending lists. To keep the lists fresh and relevant, we’ve made them country-specific for many of the top countries.

To help you convert visitors to customers, we’ve made significant changes to the app details page. We’ve moved the app name and price into a compact action bar at the top of the page, so that users can quickly download or purchase your app. Directly below, users can flip through screen shots by swiping right or left, or scroll down to read your app’s description, what’s new, reviews, and more. To help you promote your product more effectively, the page now also includes a thumbnail link to your product video which is displayed at full screen when in landscape orientation.

For users who are ready to buy, we’ve streamlined the click-to-purchase flow so that users can complete a purchase in two clicks from the app details page. During the purchase, users can also see a list of your other apps, to help you cross-sell your other products.

With a great new UI, easy access to app discovery lists, a convenient purchase flow, and more types of content, we believe that the new Market client will become a favorite for users and developers alike.

Watch for the new Market client coming to your phone soon. We’ve already begun a phased roll-out to phones running Android 2.2 or higher — the update should reach all users worldwide in the coming weeks. We encourage you to try the update as soon as you receive it. Meanwhile, check out the video below for an early look.