echo park embark • Concept 2023
A mobile experience designed for discovering curated, budget-friendly activities in Echo Park
Opportunity
How might we give budget-conscious people a way to plan a fun, customizable trip to and around Echo Park?
Instead of a generic city guide, we saw room for something narrower: a tool that filters for affordability and gives people enough context to make a new neighborhood feel low-risk.
core flows
Onboard: Tell us what you're into
Pick a few categories you care about, so the app feels tailored from the very first screen.
Explore: Echo Park stops feeling like a blank map
Attractions sorted by your interests, plus a "You Might Like These" row.
Discover: No more guessing games
Tap into any listing and see hours, price, rating, photos, and sometimes a local coupon — no surprises when you get there.
Navigate: A vague idea becomes an actual plan
Add stops to an itinerary, label it, jot a note, and hand off to maps for directions.
Map View: Seeing the whole day at a glance
See distance between stops at a glance, so you know what's a quick walk versus a trek across town.
Design and build
Working my way down, thinking from a high level structure…
Working my way down, thinking from a high level structure... I started with the persona and core barriers, then moved screen by screen into the itinerary builder and navigation flow. The working principle was context forward: show what something costs and what to expect before asking someone to commit to it.
Phase 1: User testing exposed unclear icons and a missed CTA.
I built wireframes and prototypes for the app's foundational features, including the itinerary builder. Testing surfaced our first usability issues: unclear icons, an ambiguous CTA, and confusing category labels.
Phase 2: A custom navigation feature backfired.
To make the app feel tailored from the start, we introduced an onboarding flow where users filter their interests, which then generates premade itineraries suggested based on those interests. We also built a custom in-app navigation feature that guides users stop-by-stop through their itinerary. But testing showed this added more confusion than clarity. Users struggled with the swipe-based flow and consistently missed our audio guidance feature across multiple rounds.
Phase 3: Cutting what didn't work, refining what did
Phase 3 was as much about subtraction as addition. Rather than keep iterating on a navigation experience reinventing what people already use, we cut it. Once a user builds an itinerary, the app now hands off to whichever maps app they already rely on (Apple Maps or Google Maps) instead of asking them to trust a new one. That decision freed up time to land on a visual identity that actually fit the product.
