Today, we are introducing new enhancements to the Google Maps Platform experience in the Cloud console to help further increase your development velocity and drive business impact. With this update, you can discover pre-built solutions and let our personalized step-by-step guidance help you get your experiences live faster so you can start seeing more user engagement and business impact sooner.

Try before signing up

Now when you have a great idea or want to discover common solutions, you can explore our suite of pre-built, everyday use cases before providing payment information. You can quickly build upon these solutions and export the code into your application. These sample solutions can be reused, modified, or adapted to fit your project, giving you a jumpstart to building a unique user experience. Once you’ve built upon these solutions, you just complete sign-up and export the code.

Build within minutes with guided assistance

Determining how to build or improve pre-existing solutions can take time and effort. With the new guided assistance, we walk you through recommendations that adapt to where you are in the development cycle, right when you log in. The experience considers what you’re interested in building and the use case you pick to provide you with an easy-to-follow implementation guide. Starting today,  you don't need to dig through documentation to figure out which APIs will help you achieve your goals.

Creating a real estate solution quickly

Let’s assume you are a real estate agent and want to show your clients all the properties you manage and the surrounding neighborhood. You can log in to Cloud console and have options to build or enhance your existing real estate solution. You can look through existing solutions in the solution library to see which features might be great for your project. Let’s pick the locator plus and follow the instructions to add all of your properties onto a map.

You can create a more delightful experience for your clients by providing neighborhood information using the neighborhood discovery sample solution. The sample solution will take you step by step on how to add additional highlights around your properties. You can modify highlights by adding/removing places, design, distance, and more. When ready, you can copy the code or get embeddable code to input where you want on your website. This will help your users discover what’s nearby the property.

Now, if you are a more advanced user, you can customize the experience for your users even more. On the overview page in the cloud console, you will see the new recommendations. The recommendation engine will automatically detect (or you can skip to the step manually) that you have added properties to a map and provide you with all the essential information you need to build out and add place details. It gives you an example and documentation and even lets you know what APIs are required to enable the feature, which in this example is the Places API.

Once you have implemented the feature into your project, you can move on to the following recommendation that shows you how to add details to your properties. It will keep track of where you left off, so the next time you decide to work on the project, it will bring you back to where you left off. 

We are continuously working to make it easier for you to get the most from our platform by helping you get started quickly and bring your ideas to life. Try out these new features today. We can’t wait to see what you build.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.