Placemarks

WHAT

Having shortcuts to places reduces the effort to position the map at a certain pre-defined extent.

WHY

Navigating a map to a desired location using standard map tools is difficult and cumbersome. Placemarks provide quick links to shortcut the navigation process. The fact that placemarks exist also adds special meaning and importance to the highlighted locations.

WHEN

Use placemarks to emphasize the existence of a limited set of important places, when shortcuts help improving the task performance, or repeated navigation between extents is anticipated.

HOW

Provide a limited set of links or buttons that link to the associated place or location and navigate the map (and associated content) when clicked. Labels or images need to be descriptive enough to convey their function and target state. In this context placemarks are read-only and used to simplify navigation.

Special considerations include:

• Use placemarks carefully and with the awareness that users may have spent a considerable amount of time and effort on another task (editing, zooming, analyzing) and can become frustrated or even lost when something unexpected happens or they are not sure of how to recover from that event.
• Provide a means to navigate back or recover the previous state of the application and consider warning messages if work will be lost.