Plan the whole trip, together.

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. With airfare and everyday costs climbing, group road trips have become one of the most popular ways people travel, especially for the trips built around a milestone: a birthday, a reunion, a wedding, a celebration worth the drive.

Research & ideation

Every tool left the group out.

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.

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.

Lo-fi sketchesLo-fi wireframesMid-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.

Process

The best calls were the ones to cut.

I don’t design in a straight line. I pull a wall of references into Figma, chase a mood, and start building, and then, every single time, an idea hits me mid-build and I end up somewhere completely different from where I started. I love that. It is where most of the good work comes from.

It is also how I fell for a paper-collage direction: hand-torn cars and characters with real texture and imperfection, buttons that felt handmade. I was attached to them. But the more I built, the more the whole app tipped childlike, away from the premium feel I was after. So I scrapped the style, characters and all, even though it stung.

Scrapped direction · not the final design

The smaller calls went the same way. I had leaned on drop shadows to make things feel pressable, but testing kept coming back calling them tacky and inconsistent, so they went. And I badly wanted a Spotify-Wrapped-style trip recap, but with five weeks including research, it could not earn its place over the flows that actually make the app work. Focus over fun.

Onboarding

The feeling 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.

WelcomeGet started, then allow location so nearby stops surface.

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 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. Still, 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.