As I was walking through NG3 Nottingham this afternoon, on my way towards Tesco at NG1, I was stopped by a chap in an electric car with his wife & 2 kids (lots of electric cars in Nottingham these days) and asked if I knew where Hartley Road was. They were trying to get to the House of Pain Wrestling event in St Peter’s Church Hall.

I have mapped most of NG3, 4 & 5 in Nottingham, but not NG7. He had internet on his mobile so I suggested that he bring up osm.org in his browser. To my surprise, this brought up a long list of short lines of text (I could not read them) (desktop OSM brings up the map) but after a short while he got the map of England up. I told him confidently that he could now search for Hartley Road, but he could not find a search box nor any link to a search box. By this time his wife had used Google to locate the road & also discover the route from ourselves to it (3½ miles). He thanked me and set off.

Oops. Google has got user needs & interactions well worked out, whilst OSM struggles in it’s dust to even get started.