That little orange icon that tells you where you are in Google Maps has taken on many forms: male, female, tofu, eyeball. A history of Pegman.
Pegman, that featureless orange figure: we know him as the moveable marker on Google Maps, and as our gatekeeper to Street View. We probably take him for granted. But Pegman hasn't always been Pegman.
Pegman's origin is fundamentally a design story: how do you connect, with an icon, the 2D top-down Google Maps experience with the sensation of ground-level, 360-degree Street View. It's meant to solve what's called the Subway Effect — that jarring disorientation you feel when you emerge from a station not knowing where you are or what direction you are facing. Google designers added the "yellow brick road" lines down the centers of the streets, which helped. But they needed something more.
Their first idea: eyeballs.
The first problem was that you couldn't tell which way the eyeball was facing. They tried adding an arrow, which helped a little.
But, really, it came down to the ick factor. "It was weird to pick up an eyeball," says Andy Szybalski, one of the original Pegman designers, who now works on Android. "It felt squishy and it just felt wrong. You don't want to be throwing an eyeball. Should they have a bouncing effect?" Szybalski decided to call in the help of Ryan Germick, who now leads the Doodle Team.
