almost helpful

[cellio]

My (Android) phone alerts me when traffic is bad near me. This can be handy at the end of the day because I work downtown. Except... it's telling me about traffic on roads I don't use to get home. Sure, there's spillover so it's not unhelpful, but it'd be great if I could tell it -- maybe by gesturing on a map -- what paths I care about, so it could tell me about those ones.

Does anybody reading this know of an app that does that, or a way to get Google Maps to do it? It needs to be fire and forget; I don't want to have to open the map app to look for red lines on it.

It feels like all the information is already there, if only my phone were making use of it.

(This would also let me know before I leave in the morning if traffic is still bad at the other end. At that time I don't really need extra information about traffic near my house; I need it 3-5 miles away.)

Comments

[hudebnik]

Google Now does accept feedback. Google Now is all about feedback. Things you tap on, it figures you're interested in, and will upvote similar things in the future. Things you swipe away, it will correspondingly downvote. And I'm pretty sure there are ways to say specifically "This was not helpful" or "this was helpful".

[cellio]

Things you swipe away, it will correspondingly downvote.

I wonder when that will start working for me. Since I got my new phone (and newer Android version), when I'm home I get a persistent "at location X" notification for the bus stop about 75 yards from my house. I swipe it away whenever it pops up, AFAIK I've never tapped on it, and yet it persists. (And no, I don't use that bus stop on a regular basis; I drive to work. I've used it once or twice in the last year.)

I'll look for a way to say "not helpful" next time it pops up.

[jducoeur]

... huh. That's not obvious -- worse, in my case it is usually wrong. Swiping notifications away, in my book, has *nothing whatsoever* to do with whether it is useful or not -- it just means that I'm done with it. In the case of schedule reminders, I almost never tap on it.

If that's actually being interpreted as a downvote, that's a design bug IMO...

[hudebnik]

I don't know exactly what UI actions count as what -- I work on back-end database stuff. However, I have faith that the relevant people have researched it carefully and demonstrated their findings statistically with N in the billions or trillions.