Two Wheels and a Map

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Google Maps rolls out two-wheeler mode for motorcyclists in India

Touratech World Wide links. The English publication has been updated to include the latest journey through Siberia, Mongolia, China and Sakhalin Island, and is a must-have for anyone interested in adventure travel. It may well be a cliche to talk about learning through the University of Life, but this is just how Helge Pedersen has matured and developed his personal philosophy—over the 10 years it has taken him to ride his motorcycle , miles through 77 countries.

Pedersen hails from Kristiansand, Norway. While in the U. S, he met many other foreign exchange students and began to wonder what their home countries were like. He quickly decided that one day he would see more of the world. After returning from the States, Helge completed his studies as a technical photographer and applied his skills to his position with the Norwegian rescue helicopter service in northern Norway. He soon began to realize his dream.


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In order to prepare it for a lengthy journey, he added a liter fuel tank and other bits and pieces. Finally, as Helge had imagined so many years earlier, he was on his way to a foreign land—Africa, where he traveled alone for two years. As a departing gift, some friends had given him their version of a map of the Sahara—a sheet of sandpaper marked with the letter? After reaching the southern tip of Africa, Helge turned north towards Malawi.

A dream came true when a fellow countryman hired him to help with his safari business, centered in Kasungu National Park. Five months later Helge was on the road again. Together with another tourist, the Somali military placed the two bikers under house arrest until it was confirmed neither were Soviet or Cuban soldiers crossing from Ethiopia with the intention of sabotaging military installations.

With no common language between them, Helge waited while soldiers confirmed his identity.

GlobeRiders® - 10 Years on 2 Wheels: Overview

He spent an excruciating day, worrying about loosing a hand to a swift ax in a country which practiced such radical punishment. Helge returned home only to find the travel bug had truly set its fangs—he could not settle down. Plans for the next stage of his travels began to take shape. This time, the goal was to go around the world.

Žiemos sportai, MB

With sponsorships and magazine contracts firmly in place, Pedersen boarded a cargo ship to Argentina, working in exchange for his passage. Another key takeaway from this workshop was understanding how Go-Jek drivers interacted as a community. After the immersion trip, we continued to partner remotely with more drivers throughout our product development process. Our partners in India and Indonesia helped us test routing quality, arrival times, landmark quality, and navigation.


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This testing process also helped us quickly identify roads that were not suited for two-wheelers, as well as additional landmarks that were missing from the map. Whatever the product, collaborating with people in local communities throughout the product cycle is critical to ensure a more responsible, inclusive process.

Two Wheels Media

In traditional research reports, learnings are often communicated through data. But numbers only reveal one part of the story and neglect the emotional, social, and environmental moments that make us human. Building thoughtful experiences requires a more nuanced understanding of people, which is why we decided early in the research process to record our experiences through video, photo, and audio.

We wanted to create a deep understanding that could be felt, not just known. This sensory, multimedia approach helped our teammates back home respond to our findings on an emotional level.

Engage with your local audience

When we completed our field research, we collected these artifacts and created an immersive story to recreate the feeling of actually being in the field. These storytelling elements may take time and resources to produce, but they promote empathy, advocacy, and alignment across multiple teams and time zones. Our immersive story included a set of design principles we wrote with our team as we analyzed insights in the field. These principles served as a foundation for cross-discipline teamwork and helped us focus on the most impactful improvements we could make.

Some of these principles and improvements even resulted in making the Google Maps experience better for everyone living in India and Indonesia—not just two-wheeler drivers. The design principles also helped us work out specific details. For example, Google writer Christine Nguyen referred to the guide when choosing a name for the mode. Developing the two-wheeler mode for Google Maps was the first time in years that we added a new transportation feature to our app.

Designing empathetic experiences with product teams and working with local communities was critical for ensuring a more inclusive experience for two-wheeler drivers. Google Design is a cooperative effort led by a group of designers, writers, and developers at Google. We work across teams to publish original content, produce events, and foster creative and educational partnerships that advance design and technology.

Designing Google Maps for Motorbikes. How getting your hands dirty during the research phase can lead to better, more inclusive products.

The Great Alpine Adventure

By Next Billion Users. First, we had to adapt the product to the growing number of people who rely on two-wheelers. Spending time with drivers in the field helped us build the new two-wheeler mode for Google Maps—available on Android in India and Indonesia—which includes improved voice navigation, custom routes, shortcuts, and more landmarks for better orientation while traveling by two wheels instead of four. Though this specific set of features may not directly apply to your product, immersive research tactics bring value to any design process and lead to better products.

Engage with your local audience To rethink how Google Maps could work for two-wheeler drivers, we needed to change the way we thought about the problem at hand. Two-wheeler drivers in Jakarta show us their diverse bike styles. Team up with local communities To truly understand how these issues affected drivers on a daily basis, we set out to work more closely with the people who spent the majority of their workday on a two-wheeler.

Share insights through storytelling, not just data Immersion in local communities helped the field research team relate to and empathize with our audience, but another challenge was still ahead of us. We needed to bring this deep level of understanding to our teammates who were not involved in the process and lived thousands of miles away.