Navel
Navel is a mobile travel app designed to help outdoor enthusiasts discover, research, and plan trips to nature destinations, from national parks and coastlines to the lesser-known places sitting a few kilometres from them. Built around a dark, photography-led visual system, the app gathers everything a traveler needs in order to judge a place: its cultural and historical significance, its position on a map, what sits nearby, and the reviews, photos, and videos other travelers brought back, into a single destination page.
Summer 2026 - 12 weeks
This project aimed to make choosing where to go feel like exploring rather than shopping. Most travel apps are built to close a transaction, so they surface the same well-known places behind a photo, a price, and a star rating, leaving travelers to search a name they already knew and piece together what a place actually is across a dozen browser tabs. I wanted to design an experience where depth is the product, so a traveler can wander a whole region, learn enough about one place to genuinely want to go, and end up somewhere they had never heard of.
Navel organizes exploration into three connected surfaces: browsing, the destination page, and a nearby map. Travelers move through a region by Destination, Country, or City, then narrow by category, location, rating, and distance, with a view toggle that switches results between full-bleed cards for browsing and compact rows for scanning. Each destination page holds History, Location, and Discover in a single scroll, with Review, Gallery, and Video as peer tabs so other travelers' photographs and footage are reachable before any written text. Underneath all of it, the Explore map puts a distance on every nearby card so a destination is never a dead end.
