January 12, 2020

300 words 2 mins read

How do software architects find the way to user experience? With Google Maps

How do software architects find the way to user experience? With Google Maps

A successful software system requires both a strong software architecture and a great user experience (UX). However, UX is surprisingly often neglected by software architects. Using Google Maps as an example, Matthias Naab and Marcus Trapp explore the architectural decisions behind excellent UX and the relationship between UX designers and software architects.
Talk Title How do software architects find the way to user experience? With Google Maps
Speakers Matthias Naab (Fraunhofer IESE), Marcus Trapp (Fraunhofer IESE)
Conference O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference
Conf Tag Engineering the Future of Software
Location London, United Kingdom
Date October 16-18, 2017
URL Talk Page
Slides Talk Slides
Video

A successful software system requires both a strong software architecture and a great user experience (UX). However, UX is surprisingly often neglected by software architects. The roles of UX designer and software architect are very different and require distinct educational backgrounds. Thus, designers and architects often don’t understand each other very well, resulting in a lack of respect for each other’s profession and their contribution to the overall success of a software system. Using Google Maps as an example, Matthias Naab and Marcus Trapp show how to bring these roles together as they explore the architectural decisions behind excellent UX and the relationship between UX designers and software architects. Matthias and Marcus walk you through the features of Google Maps and explain how they are realized in Google’s architecture—some that many architects would not even consider architecture decisions. This includes features like seamless panning and zooming, different information overlays and street view, route calculation, and integration with flight-booking systems as well as architectural concepts like data structures for different level of details, loading data in tiles, global distribution of data centers and data delivery (content delivery networks), optimized data structures, and calculations for live changes of routes.

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