#Meander

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  Key Screens

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  Meander

Inspiration

We noticed that most people walk the same routes every day and have completely stopped seeing their city. Navigation apps solved efficiency so well they created a new problem — turning walkers into passengers. We wanted to build something that gave people a reason to look up.

What it does

Meander is an anti-navigation app for people who walk to places. You enter your destination and get three routes — one that discovers new places, one that revisits favorites, and one that mixes both. A wishlist system surfaces places you saved and forgot about exactly when you're walking past them. The phone stays quiet while you walk, only nudging you when something nearby is worth noticing.

How we built it

We started with user research — talking to daily commuters, new city residents, and urban walkers. We mapped the user flow, defined the four core screens, and built a high-fidelity interactive prototype using Figma.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest design problem was making the app feel ambient rather than attention-grabbing — most apps are built to maximize engagement, but Meander's entire philosophy is to get out of the way. Balancing enough information to be useful with enough restraint to encourage presence was a constant tension throughout the design process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Building a fully interactive prototype that communicates the entire user flow — from home screen to active walk to wishlist nudge to saved places — in a way that feels polished and demo-ready. We're also proud of how clearly the product philosophy comes through in the visual design.

What we learned

That the best UX is often about subtraction, not addition. Every feature we removed made the experience stronger. We also learned that framing a product around a psychological insight — habituation, the low-attention default state of familiar routes — gives a design problem much more depth than starting from a feature list.

What's next for #Meander

Real map integration with Mapbox, a live community layer where walkers contribute nudge cards about places they've discovered, and a commute mode that automatically detects your regular routes and builds a wishlist of places to try along them. Long term — partnerships with local businesses and city tourism boards to surface genuinely local knowledge, not algorithm-optimized results

Built With

• figma