Google pushes the development of the Google Maps mobile app in the last few months. I noticed this for the incident reporting. It’s not only possible to report incidents, crashes, traffic jams, or obstacles on the street, but also reporting whether a reported incident is still present. Google is able to collect such a large amount of data through Google Maps users they can use to predict and show real-time traffic (red / yellow polyline)¹. Once again, providing a “free” product works. The user is paying with their (traffic) data².

This is the next Spotify post in my series of Spotify building bad UI and UX, following my previous post in which I wrote about the latest episode indicator, aka the Blue Dot .

In the last weeks, Spotify increased the number of available audiobooks. With that, I decided to give one of them a try. Since I listen to a lot of podcasts I tried to increase the playback speed to 1.5x. While it was previously at the audio player screen - where it belongs - it’s now located behind the queue button at the bottom right. The queue view is to change the songs in queue, either reordering or removing songs completely from the queue.

A long time ago I wanted to make a post about the bad UX of the route planer inside the Komoot app. I took a few screenshots of it. Now that Komoot is almost dead it’s the last chance to write about it.

When I try to plan a route, I’d expect it to be these steps:

1. Click “Plan new route” button
2. Click “Choose starting point”
3. Click the search bar (or any other way to select the starting point)
4. Enter address, select search result: the selected address is added as the starting point
5. Click “Choose destination”
6. Click the search bar (or any other way to select the destination)
7. Enter address, select search result: the selected address is added as the destination

What Komoot is doing:

The acquisition of Komoot by Bending Spoons made many people disappointed. Around 80% of Komoot’s employees lost their job, the 6 founders were each paid 20-30 million USD and a community-based app is doomed to death. Personally I’ve always been quite connected with Komoot. I planned many routes with Komoot, followed their story as a startup almost from the beginning and work in the software development of route calculation, turn-by-turn navigation, mapping technology and so on. Many times, Komoot served me as inspiration as local startup in the Berlin area and as a thriving community tech company.