BearingsBuilding the design system for a group road-trip planner.

Bearings shown across four iOS screens on a wildflower meadow: planning a new trip with the bear mascot, choosing a route, the home feed of saved trips, and the live trip hub with map and crew activity
Role
Product Designer
Team
4 designers + a lead
Timeline
5 weeks
Recognition
Audience Choice Award
Year
2026
Overview

Bearings is a group road-trip planner for iOS. It turns trip planning from a one-person job into something the whole group shapes together, from the first idea to the final route.

My role

I led the visual design and built the system. Early on I proposed making Bearings group-focused, which sharpened the concept. I wrote the interview questions, then led the visual design: the logo, the type and spacing, and a shared component library so four designers could ship one product. I designed onboarding, the home page, building a trip, and the My Trips hub.

Problem

Road trips are fun. Planning them isn't.

Everything before the drive lands on one person, spread across a group chat, a budget note, and a dozen open tabs.

Palm trees and a bank of cloud over a rest-stop parking lot full of cars A friend hanging from a rope swing over a still mountain lake A palm-lined road running out of town under an empty blue sky

18hoursis what the average American spends planning a single trip, scattered across tools never built to work together. Talker Research, 2024

Research & ideation

Every tool left the group out.

Roadtrippers, Roadie and Google Maps are great at routes, but each assumes a single planner on a single path, so we surveyed and interviewed road trippers. 90% of the people we surveyed plan their trips as a group, and the friend who always ends up planning told us the hard part was never the route or the budget. It was getting everyone else to care. Testing as we went, people kept looking for their group and their trip on the same screen, so we merged the two into a single shared hub.Bearings survey · 42 road trippers

The project's design work, screens and prototypes, arranged into a car cruising over a mountain landscape.
The Bearings visual identity board: the serif wordmark and its bear tracker, a three-ramp color system in grey, brown, and yellow with hex values, the type scale, Lucide icons, buttons, search, sliders, secondary and bottom navigation, hand-drawn bear illustrations, and the paper-map style.
Drag the knob to see the work behind it.
Solution

So we built one for the whole crew.

The hardest part was never the screens, it was us: four designers whose instinct was to add everything. I pushed us toward the flows that mattered, and when our design lead stepped away I started running the discussions.

The best calls were the ones to cut. I fell hard for a paper-collage direction, then scrapped it, characters and all, when the app tipped childlike instead of premium. Drop shadows went the same way once testing kept calling them tacky. A Spotify-Wrapped-style recap lost to the flows that make the app work.

The scrapped paper-collage home screen: a cut-out car with the crew's faces in the windows, driving over a photograph of San Francisco The collage kit that went with it: yellow cut-out vehicles, people and pets built from the crew's own photos The collage feed: trip cards with the cut-out car parked on a Big Sur photograph
Onboarding

The feeling comes before the form.

Instead of a form, I opened on real photos of friends on real road trips under one line, Roadtrips Made Together, then asked a few quick questions one at a time. Account creation moved to the very end on purpose.

The Bearings welcome screen: Get Started under the line Roadtrips Made Together.

WelcomeGet started, then allow location so nearby stops surface.

Create a trip

Five steps against eighteen hours.

I collapsed planning into five clear steps around a paper map, playful but premium, so it feels like part of the trip instead of a chore. The route sits up top, and below it are the things groups actually fight over: where to eat becomes a quick poll, the bill splits itself as you go, and the itinerary bends the second plans change.

Step one: San Francisco to Los Angeles set on the paper map.

Step 1 · Where to?Start and end. Two fields, no tabs.

Outcome

Road trips are fun. Now the planning is too.

Bearings took the Audience Choice Award at our showcase, and judges from LinkedIn and ServiceNow singled out its brand identity. It hasn’t shipped, so the numbers are still the first things I’d instrument: planning time falling from eighteen hours toward minutes, and the whole group contributing instead of one person.

Jayden and friends at Bixby Bridge, Big Sur, on a road trip
Friends on a road trip to Bixby Bridge.
The Bearings app shown on a phone on a desk
Bearings at home on a desk.