In addition to solving these problems, we had to redesign with open source in mind. On mobile devices, people often didn’t click on highlights because they didn’t know what to expect - there wasn’t much visual distinction between the main map and the highlights controls.Įarly explorations of the mobile experience on Balsamiq

Highlights: Along the bottom edge of the Timelapse map, viewers can choose to see change in different global landmarks and cities, like the Dead Sea or Lassen Volcanic National Park.

We want to make these views possible as well. Also, in the future it might be possible to show change over a period of days or months, instead of just years. That timeframe will change as we receive more images in years to come, and we want to accommodate a potentially infinite timeline.

Timelines: Timelapse shows 35 years of global satellite images, from 1984 to 2018.

It was built using iframes, with tabs along the top and bottom of the screen - a format that worked fine on desktop, but doesn’t let users see the entire Timelapse image on a phone or tablet plus all the controls.

Mobile support: The existing Timelapse site wasn’t mobile-friendly.

With a scrappy team assembled, we focused on the problems to solve:

She was also up for the tight-timeline challenge: It exemplified how teams in an organization as big as Google can be agile if the need arises. What appealed most to Sam was the chance to contribute to a platform that helps people visualize how the Earth has changed, in a very digestible format.

(Plus, when people ask Tom what he does at Google, he can say semi-seriously, “I work on time travel.”) For Tom, working on Timelapse was a way to do what Google does best: using data to create an amazing and focused experience. Tom is a design lead for Google’s Display & Video 360 project Sam is a user experience designer on the Geo Enterprise team, primarily working on Google Maps Platform. This has been a 20% project for Tom and Sam.

Google timelapse earth