Focus on user experience add competitive advantages

We regularly bring you updates from leading social media channels.  Today we look at recent updates from Google. Apart from improving user experience, these updates also add more competitive advantages

Use Google Map to find a parking lot:

Google has taken this feature outside of US to 25 cities across Europe.  The ‘parking difficulty icon’ informs you of the range of difficulties – limited, medium or easy - and is based on historical parking data along with advanced machine learning.  An additional feature ‘find parking’ is now available across select cities in the US.  After tapping ‘parking difficulty icon’, a small map with available nearby parking lots appears with estimated walk time from the current location.

YouTube ‘breaking news’ and ‘logo’ change:

A couple of weeks ago YouTube introduced a new carousel called ‘breaking news’ to its homepage.  It’s not clear if this will be a permanent feature or will appear only during major events.  More recently, YouTube changed its logo to be more flexible across a variety of devices and screen sizes.  This apparently is the first of many changes scheduled in the months ahead.

Google adds ‘video previews’ in search results:

Video previews allow users to determine the relevance of the contents in a video.  Thus, reducing the chances of a user clicking and watching a video that doesn’t suit his/her needs.   This is a marked improvement in user experience from the static images of the videos that were shown earlier in search results without any details.