Why I Love Waze

Waze, a community-based navigation app used by millions of people, is the most recent product I have fallen in love with due to its simple driving solution, community ethos and clean UI. As a second year business school student at UCLA, I constantly drive through Los Angeles for meetings and events. The city is unique in that car commuters go through all of the stages of grief when it comes to L.A. traffic: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I spend an average of 60 minutes a day driving through city traffic. Waze helps me maximize the value of my day by pinpointing the quickest route from point A to point B. Without Waze, I would likely spend an extra 15-20 minutes a day driving around the city.

Waze’s user-centered design features are one of my favorite aspects of the product as it maximizes my situational awareness while driving. Furthermore, the interface is frictionless enough that real-time decision-making is barely affected. The navigation map is legible while also providing the right balance of data to process (highway speed, roadblocks, distance to destination / next turn), voice activation works extremely well and the icons are visible in almost all lighting conditions.

The community network is one of my favorite features of the app as users work together to report road hazards, construction, and police speed traps. On several occasions while driving on the highway, I have been immediately rerouted to take advantage of an empty side street, cutting my commute by 5 minutes. It is like receiving a personal heads up from acquaintances on the road. The community reporting feature is also controversial, as the National Sheriff’s Association believes that it puts police officers in harms way by reporting their location. Waze insists that this feature makes for safer driving conditions, as the company believes that people tend to drive safer when they know they are in close proximity to law enforcement.