✍️ Overview

Placemark today feels technical, utilitarian, sharp, and unforgiving. It is still straightforward, easy to learn, and does a good job at slowly exposing more powerful tools as a job is being completed — this keeps the interface feeling lightweight and simple.

There are three key areas Placemark might improve:

1. Look and feel — with a few changes, Placemark can still feel powerful, but more approachable. It can retain it’s utilitarian aesthetic, while being more forgiving of a user’s mistakes. And the product can use color more effectively to guide attention, create a scannable interface, and help people immediately identify their current state and the next step to take.
2. Interaction design — there are many places where we can streamline interactions, provide clear feedback about the result of a given interaction, and in some cases remove certain interactions entirely to simplify the interface further.
3. Layout and hierarchy — key changes to the layout and visual hierarchy will make Placemark easier to understand and navigate.

🎥 Watch the Loom

https://www.loom.com/share/839703a8cd964df99183ceed84f972d3

✨ Look and feel

Placemark feels technical, utilitarian, sharp and unforgiving. Many interface elements are small, using 12pt font size, providing more density at the cost of scalability and click target size. Buttons, toggles, and dropdowns have small click areas, trading a requirement for high user precision with the ability to display more controls in a small area.

Corners are sharp across the board, using a 2px radius on most elements. The icon set uses thin strokes with sharp caps, affording more detail at small sizes, but making the icons feel sharp and prickly. Perhaps most importantly, the interface is unforgiving because it’s possible for users to destroy work in progress without being prompted for a confirmation (i.e. deleting an entire custom map).