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

Advisor

Self Guided

Advisor

Self Guided

Skills

UX/UI Design, Figma, User Research, Wireframing, Prototyping

Skills

UX/UI Design, Figma, User Research, Wireframing, Prototyping

Team

Individual

Team

Individual

Project Goal

Project Goal

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.

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.

Design Solution

Design Solution

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.

Link to Case Study Presentation

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.

Link to Case Study Presentation

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