Myles — product designer
Connecting visitors to New York City's local heartbeat.
Navi reframes tourism from destination checklists to intentional neighborhood participation.78%of concept-test participants preferred neighborhood-led recommendations over generic top-ten lists
New York City sees over 60 million visitors each year. Most go to the same ten places. Meanwhile, local businesses outside those corridors struggle for visibility, and residents absorb the side effects of concentrated foot traffic.
Navi was designed to change that dynamic by connecting visitors to neighborhood-level experiences that return value to the communities they visit.
We audited six travel platforms and ran a heuristic evaluation of Airbnb using Nielsen's ten usability heuristics. Most tools were either transactional or editorial, but few connected discovery to community impact.
We then surveyed tourism professionals, local business owners, and long-time residents. Residents provided the richest dataset and most strongly shaped the personas.
Early on, the team considered a heatmap solution to reroute tourists away from congestion. The research reframed the problem: residents did not want fewer tourists; they wanted visitors who engage more intentionally.
Residents consistently favored hidden gems over tourist traps and aligned with community-driven travel models.
Major concerns included overcrowding, rising local costs, and the loss of neighborhood authenticity. Participants were open to AI personalization only when it remained subtle and transparent.
Three personas emerged: Cain (group planner), Ororo (newcomer needing context), and Selina (commuter needing precision filters).
Given semester time constraints and no engineering handoff, the team focused on a coherent concept with real neighborhoods, realistic pricing, and clear user pathways.
The resulting framework was Learn, Plan, Go:
Journey mapping validated the structure across all three personas.
Every design decision linked back to research findings or persona needs.
Jost was selected for display typography to echo urban wayfinding cues. Orange became the primary accent to differentiate Navi from category defaults. Paired with Lato and a 4px spacing system, the UI remains readable and consistent across breakpoints.
The homepage emphasized editorial curation over algorithmic volume. Labels such as Locally owned and Nature first gave users trust signals at a glance.
On the activity flow, Learn-Plan-Go came together through neighborhood context, collaborative planning tools, and transit-aware navigation.
Navi showed that community-centered travel can be both practical and desirable when recommendations are curated with local context.
The concept validated that intent-rich exploration scales better than algorithmic browsing when the goal is meaningful neighborhood engagement.
Next opportunities include:
Redesigned a newsletter system to match a fresh site rebrand—modular templates, competitive research across 120+ examples, and a 75% lift in open rates.
A wayfinding app for Black travel in America. Routes that maximize daylight and weigh community safety observations alongside public data.