Plan the whole trip, together.

Bearings, a group road-trip planner, shown across four iOS screens over a wildflower meadow: a welcome screen with a bear mascot, the home feed of saved trips, the trip builder, and the route map with stops
Role
Product Designer
Team
4 designers + a lead
Timeline
5 weeks
Platform
iOS app concept
Read time
12 min
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 a group-focused road-trip planner, which narrowed our audience and gave the concept a sharper focus. I created the user interview questions, helped with ideation, and made tons of drafts in both lo-fi and hi-fi before jumping into the final designs. From there, I led the visual design. I built the design system and a set of shared components so the team could move fast and keep every screen feeling like one product, and I set the type, spacing, and sizing that held it all together. I designed the logo and most of the assets, and I designed 28 of the final screens, including onboarding, the home page, building a trip, and the My Trips hub. I often jumped in to help teammates finalize their screens against the system.

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.

The problem

Road trips are fun. Planning them isn't.

The best part of a road trip is the drive. The worst part is everything that comes before it: the group chat where everyone drops a place they want to stop, the note with the budget, the open tabs for gas, food, and where to sleep. None of it talks to each other, and it all lands on whoever ends up planning.

How might we…

Design a road trip app that unifies route planning, stop discovery, and group collaboration into one experience that’s as fun to use as the trip itself?

Palm trees and tall clouds over a California parking lot. A rope swing over a still mountain lake ringed by pine forest. A palm-lined street with a fresh green bike lane.
A few aesthetic shots from my road trips.

Research & ideation

Every tool was built for one person.

We started with what people already use. Roadtrippers, Roadie, and Google Maps are all great at routes and directions, but every one of them assumes a single planner on a single path, with no room for a group to shape the trip together. To see how real that gap was, we surveyed and interviewed road trippers.

Bearings survey · 42 road trippers

The interviews put a face to it. 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 about the trip as much as she did. I knew the feeling, because I’m usually the one planning, and it’s hard to hold a trip together when no one else feels any ownership over it.

She became Jasmine, our persona: 23, social, always up for a road trip and always the one organizing it. She wants trips worth remembering without carrying them alone, she watches the plan scatter across a Notes app and a group chat that never sync, and what she needs is one place to build the trip and a way to pull her friends into it.

Jasmine set the brief. Bearings had to adapt to her from the first screen, hold the whole trip in one place, and leave real room for the group to shape it.

We moved from sketches to lo-fi to mid-fi, 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.

Hand-drawn low-fidelity sketches of the onboarding, group, home, and trip itinerary screens.
Lo-fi sketches
Low-fidelity digital wireframes of the Bearings flows.
Lo-fi wireframes
Mid-fidelity wireframes of the Bearings flows.
Mid-fi

The solution

So we built one for the whole crew.

Everything the research surfaced became a requirement. Jasmine needed one place to build the trip and a way to pull her friends into it, so that became the spine of the system: onboarding that learns how she travels, five steps that turn an idea into a trip, and a shared page where the trip lives. I designed 28 of the final screens. These are the ones that carry the story.

The hardest part was never the screens, it was us. My team came from different design backgrounds and rarely felt on the same page, and our instinct was to add everything. I could see the scope getting away from us, so I pushed us to focus on the flows that actually mattered. A lot of design, for me, comes down to consistency: every page should feel like it was sewn from the same yarn. So I took it on myself to build shared components for the team, not to override anyone, but to give us one direction to move in together. When our design lead stepped away, I started running the discussions after our scheduled meetings, leaving notes on my teammates’ work about what was landing and what wasn’t. I was that vocal because I was set on making something I could be proud to put here. I am.

Onboarding

The fun comes before the form.

I saw the first screens as a chance to set the tone. Instead of dropping people into a form, I opened on real photos of friends on real road trips under one line, Roadtrips Made Together, so you feel what Bearings is for before you touch a single field.

From there I kept it easy and intuitive: a few quick questions about how she travels, one at a time, each one sharpening what Bearings suggests on the road. And I moved account creation to the very end on purpose, since asking someone to sign up before they’ve felt the product is a well-documented way to lose them, and deferring it can lift completion by 10 to 30 percent. Jasmine explores first, and commits once she’s already in.

The Bearings welcome screen and its location prompt: Get Started, then allow location so nearby stops surface.
WelcomeGet started, then allow location so nearby stops surface.
Onboarding vehicle screen with sedan selected and a 2013 Honda Accord entered, used to estimate fuel costs and gas stops.
Your vehicleCar details drive fuel stops and cost estimates later.
Onboarding travel style screen with selectable chips for fastest route, scenic, and nature preferences.
Travel styleFastest, scenic, or nature tunes what Bearings suggests.
Onboarding stop preferences screen with sliders for how often to stop, how far off route to go, and gas budget.
StopsHow often she stops, and how far she will stray, shapes the route.
Onboarding needs and accessibility screen with lodging style and accessibility options selected.
Needs & lodgingAccessibility and lodging are asked once, not mid-trip.
The Bearings create-account flow: from a where-to-first prompt to a sign up filled with name, email, and password.
Create accountAn account so trips save and the crew stays in sync.
The Bearings home screen after onboarding, showing Plan A New Trip with a bear illustration and personalized scenic stop suggestions.
HomeBy the home screen, Bearings already knows how she travels.

Create a trip

Five steps against eighteen hours.

Planning eats eighteen hours because every decision lives in a different app, so I collapsed it into five clear steps. I put the most care into the paper map at the center of it, I wanted planning to feel playful but still premium, like part of the trip instead of a chore. Yellow carries through the whole flow as the accent, never enough to overwhelm, just enough to feel unmistakably Bearings.

This screen is the whole case for Bearings, so it’s the one I sweated most. The research kept telling me a group falls apart without a shared place, so I made the trip itself that place. The route sits up top where everyone can see it, 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. The road trip games I added just because they would make me smile on a long drive.

Step one: from an empty Where to form to San Francisco and Los Angeles set.
Step 1 · Where to?Start and end. Two fields, no tabs.
Step two: May 6 to 9 picked on one shared calendar.
Step 2 · When?One calendar replaces the group poll.
Step three: stops added with their detour cost shown in minutes.
Step 3 · Add stopsDetours priced in minutes, so the group debates with numbers.
Step four: Marge and Enoch join by iMessage with a 600 dollar budget set.
Step 4 · Who’s coming?Crew in by iMessage, budget beside them.
Step five: the trip named and reviewed.
Step 5 · Name itLighthouse epic waterfall adventure. Go.
The home screen with the new trip on top and past trips below.
HomeCurrent trip up top, past trips below, and a clean nav with one yellow plus to start the next.
The Bearings trip page: shared route map, a group vote on where to eat, and expenses split down to $24.69 owed to Phil’s Fish Market.
The trip pageEvery trip lands here: one map, group votes, split costs.

Outcome

Road trips are fun. Now the planning is too.

Bearings took the audience choice award at our showcase, but the numbers I actually care about are the ones tied to the problem. It hasn’t shipped yet, so those are the first things I’d instrument: planning time dropping from eighteen hours toward minutes, the whole group contributing instead of one person, and a plan that holds together instead of falling apart.

There’s more to build. A recap page to relive the trip once it’s over, a light badge system to make planning feel rewarding, and the truest test of all, taking Bearings on a real road trip to see where it holds and where it breaks.

The biggest lesson was that designing for a group is a different problem than designing for a person. The hard part was never the interface. It was getting everyone to care, and that shaped how I approached every screen.

What I’m proudest of isn’t the award, it’s the voice I found. When we lost direction, I could have given up, but I stood up, ran the discussions, and gave real feedback on my teammates’ work. It grew me as a designer, and it helped a friend and teammate push his own designs further. Being able to give feedback I believed in, built from everything I’d studied about UX, is when this stopped feeling like practice and started feeling like the work I want to do.