Allow easier “starting at home”

[navid-zamani]

🚀 feature request

Description

Right now, “starting from home” is unecessarily difficult, (unless either GPS has already found your posiion (which always takes a while when starting out), or one prostitute one’s data to Google so one gets A-GPS.)

Most of the time, I start from home; which is probably the case for >50% of all routes for most people. Yet when opening navigation or picking a destination, is is very difficult to set the preset home as the starting point. While setting home as the destination is asymmetrically trivial, thanks to the dedicated button.

Describe the solution you'd like

A) When starting navigation by picking a destination, and if a start is not yet set, and positioning has not been enabled or found a posiion yet (e.g. when indoors or planning your route for tomorrow), automatically default to home as the starting point.

B) In any case, when starting navigation by tapping the navigation button and then the starting point, offer the same dedicated home/work buttons.

C) Of course, once a posiion has been found, and if the start has been set automatically instead of manually, one could still switch to using the current location as the starting point. (Although I think it’s not necessary. But others might disagree.)

Describe alternatives you've considered

Tapping the home location in the map first, and then “navigaion”, turns it into the destination, and swapping start and destinaion locations is blocked for no reason. There is a hidden item in the “actions” overflow menu but it is again unecessarily hidden, and not intuitive.
Plus, often, home is not on the map but one first has to pan and zoom.

And search just doesn’t show home as a pinned location at the top. So it is just too slow to find it via the search.

[itzikiap]

It's quite easy to set the starting point from one of the favorites, just tap the top position and select the favorite. But to set the position as "home" I had to scroll and find it. Luckily I don't have lots of favorites. I would suggest sorting home and other presets before the favorites list.

[navid-zamani]

I knew you would answer exactly this. ^^

It only seems quite easy, if one has barely any favorites at all. I have hundrets, like anyone actively using the app for many years.

The thing is, that there is no way to sort so that home comes to the top. As the sorting orders available are 1.by distance, which only works if I already positioned the center of the map almost perfectly on the home marker, which is unecessarily cumbersome, and in which case I could just tap the marker instead anway, and 2. alphabetical, which is of course useless with more than say one, two screens worth of favorites. (It’s not exactly an SQL SELECT equivalent interface. ;), or 3. by category, which given that memorizing catefory names amd their order is silly, is useless in any case.

In my quick test, using my the laat posiion of the map from yesterday’s tour, home was about 55% or 13½ screen pages down the list of favortes.

It just is not consistent to have home and work promienntly displayed when picking a destination from the favorites, yet de-facto hidden away when picking a starting point. Having the same UI would even save the work maintaining two different UIs that exclusively implement disadvantages.

Especially when assuming the special group of personal favorites exists for a reaaon.

Also, I just noticed: How come that when I pick a starting point or destination, the favorites aren’t shown in the same grouped structure as when opening the favorites from the sidebar? Thats another duplicate UI that could be merged and save maintenance work. :)

Save yourself the work. ;) Emergence is such a nice design concept!

[michaelblyons]

I also spend more time than I want to, scrolling through favorites to select "Home" for navigation.

[sonora]

I share your concerns about UI duplication and associated bugs and code/support efforts, whole-heartedly. 😉 We have multiple examples of this in our UX.

Possible workaroud for your issue at hand: Create a favorite called "__Home", with 1 or 2 underscore characters as prefix. This is sorted to the top in alphabetical sorting. For me it is even displayed directly as a button to the right of the "Favorite" button you see when you tap the "From: My Position" line on the route configuration screen:

[vshcherb]

I actually agree that dialog could fit 2 most important favorites Home / Work, so you don't need to play around with Favorite names.

[Cwpute]

Also, I just noticed: How come that when I pick a starting point or destination, the favorites aren’t shown in the same grouped structure as when opening the favorites from the sidebar? Thats another duplicate UI that could be merged and save maintenance work. :)

a PERFECT solution to my problem right here. If only favourites were wrganized in folders, like you're prompted to when creating favourites ! what's the point of having them groupe if they all appear so disorganized…

[Cwpute]

so as notified above, i created a new issue with this more specific goal in mind ☝️ feel free to contribute

[The-Nickname]

Alternatively/in addition here(marked in green) might be another good spot for "home"

The workplace might even fit as well.

[kavalanche]

I would also add Work . It's most often Home or Work that I use as starting point to check/plan route. There is a reason they are very simply accesible as destinations. I don't understand why not as staring points. Sometimes I just want to check how to get from home to point A regardless of where I am at the moment.