Why do many online maps like Google have so little contrast? It's very different to printed maps over here. You basically have a really hard time seeing the white roads on the light grey background, especially when looking at the display from some angle.
Google Maps is now a business directory with a map interface.
The highest contrast is reserved for business that are paying Google for advertisements, followed by other shops, hotels, restaurants and bars.
Everything else, but especially roads and railways, are desaturated into mush.
Compare Streetmap UK[1], which was the first popular online mapping service for the UK in 1997. The web design has hardly changed, and up to the linked zoom level they're still showing the standard (government-produced Ordnance Survey) "paper" maps.
I'm somewhat sure that the low contrast predates advertisement on maps by several years. I also doubt Google would willingly compromise Maps's usability for the sake of advertising, especially right from the start where there is enough low-hanging fruit and revenue is bound to be negligible. That would be like plastering ads over the google.com homepage, something they continue to resist two decades in.
My money is on either a wish to make (all kinds of) labels stand out, or just aesthetic preferences. FWIW I always found OSM to have too much contrast (and too much details), and the emergence of all these services rebranding OSM in different styles would seem to be evidence for other people also considering OSM's default style to leave room for improvement.
> You basically have a really hard time seeing the white roads on the light grey background, especially when looking at the display from some angle.
Also how past a certain zoom level forests simply vanish and the distinction between built-up areas and "open space that isn't a park" (which isn't too great to start with) gets smaller and smaller until it's virtually impossible to distinguish.
I just tried this, and it's somewhat strange? Zoom out until you can see the globe, and forests are shown. Zoom in one step, and forests are all but invisible. As you continue to zoom in, contrast is all over the place.
Turning on terrain mode does, however, increase contrast for every zoom level.
It's even more annoying that they reuse the same color scheme for Android Auto - the Maps map is significantly less contrasty than my Mazda's built-in car nav and it's also significantly less glanceable.
Alas, accessibility seems to take the back seat lately. Gray-on-grey designs, non-button buttons, mystery meat controls: it all looks cool, supposedly.
There's a very good reason: because they're mostly used as the background to the location of spots you're searching for, or driving/transit directions.
Your search pins or path are foregrounded with excellent contrast against the map because this is what people are looking for 99% of the time.
These days, it's very rare to use an online map just as a map to "browse". Obviously you still can, but it's probably like 1% of the time. And the "low contrast" version still works for that, it's just not optimized for it.
For online maps I'd guess that placing an emphasis on navigation instead of exploration/discovery means that the navigation route as well as your current position on it should be always clearly visible. The map underneath then get desaturated and toned down enough to never interfere with that. Whereas paper maps never had the problem that you want to see an overlay amidst all the map lines.
