Inspiration
Transportation problems can be confusing, especially when you're away from family or handling one for the first time. You may need to think about your immediate safety, remember details, and decide who to contact, all while stressed.
NextStep Road brings those thoughts into one guided experience. It focuses on organizing information and offering general preparedness steps for those least-expected moments.
What it does
NextStep Road helps students make sense of unexpected transportation issues. Instead of starting with a blank chat box, struggling to think of what to even ask, users choose what happened and answer guided questions. The app uses those answers to organize a safety-first plan with general next steps. It’s a planning tool, not a replacement for emergency services or professional advice.
How I built it
I built NextStep Road as a solo ShellHacks project using React and Vite for the frontend and Node.js and Express for the backend. I organized the app around a guided question flow and kept the Gemini integration on the backend, separate from the screens users interact with.
Challenges I ran into
The hardest part was deciding how much guidance to give in order to provide realistic help in those situations without overstepping on what kind of guidance the service is meant to provide.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I’m proud of turning a stressful, open-ended problem into a more approachable experience. The guided format gives users a place to start, and building the frontend and backend as separate pieces helped me make the project easier to understand and work on during a short hackathon.
What we learned
I learned that designing an AI feature is as much about setting boundaries as it is about generating an answer. For this project, the important question was not just “What can Gemini produce?” but “What information would actually help someone feel more organized in this situation?”
What's next for NextStep Road
Next, I’d like to expand the incident-specific guidance. I’d also like to make the experience more useful on a phone, since that’s where someone would most likely reach for it when something goes wrong.
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