[Feature Request] POI Popup - Routing Actions

[QJKX]

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After loading a URL full of POIs it would be helpful to be able to choose to use POIs in the route, especially on a touchscreen where your finger covers the routing pins

Maybe in the popup?

Or at the bottom change the text "Start drawing a route to get stats." to "Route from here" etc. when there is no route yet and a POI is selected.

[rkflx]

Maybe in the popup?

I know this approach to the UI is used by other popular platforms, but personally I'm not convinced this is the way to go for BRouter-Web.

We only need a single tap for placing markers, instead of having to place a marker and needing to select its function in a second step. This gets quickly out of hand once you consider the need to include a button to mark POIs as vias too, how to reorder POIs included in the route, what should happen when there already is another start marker, the fact that then start marker and POI marker are directly on top of each other with one being inaccessible, the popup getting so large most of the map is hidden or auto-moved during opening etc.

Or at the bottom

Replacing the statusbar with a toolbar while a POI popup is opened is certainly a nice idea with plenty of opportunities for better UX, at least on mobile. However, it should also be triggered when there already is an existing route, otherwise it might be confusing to users when they cannot find a piece of UI anymore they had been using before.

This approach would have less issues than adding buttons inside of the popup, but some of the challenges mentioned above (which we might be able to overcome?) would also apply here, of course.

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IMO our current design, which is to exclusively edit a route by adding and moving start/via/end markers on the map, is simple, efficient and in the meantime works well enough (admittedly not excellent) on mobile too when zooming in sufficiently beforehand. Adding duplicate functionality to achieve the same thing through POI popups or toolbars will need more interaction design work than simply adding two buttons, otherwise the UI might become a bit confusing and complex with duplicate functionality.

That being said, there are certainly opportunities to improve how route markers work on mobile in general:

• [ ] In editing mode, tapping on the map to place a marker but opening a POI popup by accident instead is annoying. We might want to think about implementing a long tap as well as a double tap to open the POI popup, so a single short tap to place a marker works in more cases. IOW, make route markers the primary use case, and consider POIs only after that.
• [ ] The pointy end of the marker functions as a precise indicator to its exact location, however on mobile it is covered by your (usually) opaque finger during editing. Perhaps it might make sense to flip around markers on mobile so the pointy end is at the top (accommodating both left and right handed users), or to research how others have approached this challenge. Note this is not unique to POIs, but affects all markers.
• [ ] There are issues interacting with markers on Apple's browser engine on iOS. Still, rather than adding buttons as workarounds this should be fixed properly in the correct place.