Timeline
Mar 2021 – Mar 2022 | 12 months
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator, AirTable
Team
Founder/CEO, Engineers, PM & Junior Designer and interns
My Role
Founding → Lead Designer / Advisor
01 / Discovery
Understand the Pain Points
50%
of U.S. campers found it difficult to find a campsite in 2021
5+ hrs
spent by nearly half of campers planning their trips
Multiple
apps required for research and navigation
Key Insight
Planning outdoor trips is a fragmented experience. Users jump between multiple apps and websites, leading to frustration and decision fatigue.
Competitive Analysis
To identify gaps in outdoor discovery platforms, I worked with leadership and analyzed competitors like AllTrails and Hip Camp. Key findings revealed:
Fragmented Datasets
Most apps focused narrowly on hiking or camping, forcing users to juggle multiple tools for trip planning.
Static Recommendations
Algorithms lacked contextual awareness (e.g., weather, skill level), leading to unreliable or generic suggestions.
Mobile Usability Gaps
Weak mobile-first experiences especially for on-the-go trip planning.
02 / Define
Understand the Users
Personas
Through research synthesis, we developed three primary personas that anchored every design decision throughout the project. These personas represented fundamentally different relationships with information density, which directly shaped how we designed the filtering system, destination profiles, and Smart Planning flow.
User Journey Mapping
We mapped the complete user journey from trail filtering to offline saving, ensuring every design decision was rooted in observed behaviors.
03 / Develop
Design System
When I joined the team, the app urgently needed consistent visual guidelines and reusable components to support scalability and efficiency, so I established a comprehensive design system before translating wireframes into high-fidelity mockups.
Primary Colors
Functional Colors
Designed to differentiate between map layers and conditions—selected for clarity, accessibility, and harmony.
Typography
I selected Roboto for its versatility, readability, and strong performance across digital platforms. I then established a clear type scale, defining styles for headings, subheadings, body text, and UI labels to ensure consistency across screens.
Iconography
I curated and refined a custom set focused on simplicity and clarity, designed to scale well across different sizes and use cases.
Components
I built the entire library of reusable components that are aligned with the brand identity while maintaining functional clarity.
04 / Delivered Key Features
Detailed Filtering
Pain Points
Preliminary user research revealed that many users struggled to find suitable trips due to limited and hard-to-access filters. Participants often mentioned frustration when sorting through irrelevant results, with key criteria like trail difficulty or campsite amenities either missing or too hidden to be useful.
Solution
One of the key design solutions in Pathloom is the detailed filtering system that is easily accessible when browsing. Within the primary navigation, users can quickly choose between hiking or camping, with specific filters for each.
Users in beta testing reported meaningfully faster decisions when filtering, with key criteria like trail difficulty and campsite amenities surfaced upfront rather than buried — eliminating the back-and-forth that previously defined the planning experience.
Smart Planning
Pain Points
Novice adventurers often felt overwhelmed by endless options, while experienced users wasted time manually cross-referencing trails and campsites.
Solution
Smart Planning simplifies trip creation by guiding users through survey-style forms that capture preferences such as activity type, trip duration, and skill level, then generating a personalized itinerary with recommended trails, campsites, and activities based on those inputs.
The final design delivers a ready-to-use, personalized itinerary organized by day with essential details. Usability testing confirmed reduced planning time and increased user confidence, with users valuing the tailored recommendations and lower decision fatigue.
Comprehensive Profiles
Pain Points
Users were forced to consult multiple sources to gather essential trip information, creating frustration and decision paralysis.
Solution
The comprehensive destination profiles in Pathloom are designed to equip users with all the information they need to plan confidently and efficiently:
At-A-Glance Overview
Core metrics like distance, elevation gain, estimated duration, plus accessibility considerations
Data-Driven Visualizations
- Interactive elevation chart showing difficulty spikes
- Elevation charts helped 72% of test users better assess difficulty before booking
- Campground maps with site-specific details (shade, privacy, proximity to water)
Community Reviews & Insights
- Firsthand accounts from other users about trail and campsite experiences
- Information on current conditions, crowd levels, and seasonal tips
- Helps users set expectations and make more confident decisions during trip planning
Weather & Coverage
- Current conditions and 3-day forecast overlays for trip timing
- Historical climate data (e.g., “Typical May temperatures: 45°F–68°F”) to support seasonal planning
- Mobile coverage availability by service providers to help users anticipate connectivity
05 / Results
Impact & Outcomes
35%
Reduction
in trip planning time — based on analytics data and direct feedback from the team working with beta users, streamlining filters and unifying datasets across the experience meaningfully cut the time users spent going from discovery to a finalized itinerary.
40%
Fewer
misclicks in critical flows — browsing and filtering interactions improved significantly, validated through usability testing and internal analysis of beta user behavior.
30%
Faster
design iteration for post-MVP features — a direct result of the scalable component library, enabling the team to move from wireframe to high-fidelity significantly faster on subsequent features.