Niantic Wayfarer lets you create adventures for yourself and others by mapping areas in your neighborhood that encourage movement, exploration, and social engagement.

Wayfinders (experienced Niantic game players) can nominate Niantic Wayspots – unique sites in the real world that range from historic landmarks to hyperlocal street art – while exploring.

Wayfinders can also go at other people’s nominations from places they’ve visited or where they’ve played. A nomination will become a new Niantic Wayspot if it receives enough good feedback.

Niantic Wayfarer is available for all devices in the form of a website. This site has recently received some subtle changes in the form of UI updates.

This, unfortunately, hasn’t gone down well with its users, some of whom have described it as the most broken update ever.

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Source

The height of the map areas seem to have been reduced quite a bit on the desktop version, which is a bit of a pain. On the bright side, you can get large previews of other wayspot photos as popups now, rather than having them load in a new browser tab.
Source

Users say that all visual updates so far have been the opposite of an improvement and have led to plenty of issues and annoyances.

The most talked-about problem with the new Niantic Wayfarer UI is auto-scrolling. This can, fortunately, be turned off from the Wayfarer settings.

However, that’s not all. Several users have also complained about layout issues due to which the mobile site doesn’t fill up the display area properly and instead overflows. Due to this, several elements get cropped out.

niantic-wayfarer-ui-overflow

Along with this, all the photos and fonts are reportedly around 25% smaller now. The stars used for nominations and ratings have also undergone a size reduction and are now reportedly harder to click.

Users also report getting black boxes for location accuracy. Links in descriptions have been rendered unclickable.

There are issues with street view as well. It can’t be looked at at all, aside from the closest one. Quitting it causes no ‘yellow character’ to grab for dropping anymore.

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Stars not displaying on desktop site (Click to enlarge)

That said, it seems that development for the new Niantic Wayfarer UI for Pokemon Go and Ingress players is still underway.

Thus, one can almost consider the site as being in the beta stage currently – a beta version that’s rough around the edges.

While there hasn’t been any official acknowledgment from Niantic for these problems, it is highly likely that they will all be resolved soon.

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Zohaib Ahmed
824 Posts

Simply love being surrounded by technology as it's a constant reminder of how far humans have advanced as a race. Every new development feels exciting, which I convey to others through writing. And after a day's work, gaming just feels therapeutic.

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