Wayfare

The challenge

Every mapping app optimizes for the same thing: the fastest line between two points. But people who walk — commuters, parents with strollers, anyone avoiding a loud road on a hot day — choose routes for reasons no app measures.

I set out to design a navigation product where the quality of the walk is the primary input, not an afterthought buried in settings.

Research

I interviewed nine daily walkers across three neighborhoods and shadowed four of them on their usual routes, mapping where they deviated from the “optimal” path and asking why. Three patterns kept surfacing:

• Comfort beats speed. Seven of nine regularly took routes 5–10 minutes longer to stay in shade or avoid traffic noise.
• Knowledge is local and unshared. Everyone had hard-won shortcuts and pleasant detours no map surfaced.
• Confidence collapses mid-route. People trusted their start, then second-guessed themselves at large intersections.

Process

I mapped the core loop — plan, walk, adjust — and prototyped three routing models before landing on “route personalities”: Fast, Calm, and Green, each a transparent trade-off the user picks per walk rather than a buried preference.

My landscape training did real work here: reading a street the way I’d read a site — sun path, enclosure, planting, noise — gave the team a vocabulary for scoring segments that engineers could actually build against.

The turn-by-turn list became a walk profile: shade coverage, noise level, and green share, visible before you commit.

Outcome

The final prototype tested with eight participants in moderated sessions: all eight completed an unfamiliar route unaided, and six said they would switch from their current app for everyday walks.

What I’d push next: community-sourced detours — the local knowledge from research is the product’s real moat, and the current design only hints at it.