Convoy

Road trips are best with people — but coordinating a convoy of cars, aligning on stops, pacing the drive, and staying connected across vehicles is surprisingly hard. Convoy is a mobile app and service experience designed to make group road trips feel effortless, letting everyone stay in sync from planning to the final destination.

Before jumping into solutions, I wanted to understand the real friction points in group road trips. I surveyed participants and uncovered a consistent pattern: coordination breaks down not at the destination, but in the small moments in between.

User Persona

To ground the design decisions, I built a primary persona representing the typical group trip organizer — someone who takes on the invisible labor of coordination while also wanting to enjoy the trip themselves.

Pain Points

Four core pain points emerged consistently across participants, each revealing a different layer of coordination friction.

With pain points clearly mapped, I moved into ideation. The challenge was to design something that works both as a planning tool before the trip and a live coordination layer during the drive — without requiring everyone to stare at their phone.

Service Blueprint

The service blueprint maps the full journey — from trip creation to arrival — across all actors: the organizer, group members, and the backend systems enabling real-time coordination. This helped ensure no touchpoint was left undesigned.

User Flows & Wireframes

I mapped the key user flows — creating a convoy, joining one, proposing a stop, and receiving real-time alerts — then translated them into low-fidelity wireframes to test the structure before committing to visual design.

With the structure validated, I moved into high-fidelity design. The visual language needed to feel energetic and adventurous while remaining legible in glance-and-go moments on the road.

Style Guide

I built a style guide to maintain visual consistency across all screens — establishing a warm, earthy color palette that evokes open roads and natural landscapes, paired with a high-legibility type system.

High-Fidelity Screens

The final screens cover the three core experiences: Trip Planning (collaborative itinerary building), Live Convoy View (real-time group map), and Stop Coordination (voting on and proposing new stops mid-drive).

User Testing & Feedback

I conducted usability testing with participants from the original research pool, asking them to complete three scenarios: create a convoy, propose a stop, and check on group members' locations. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive on the real-time map and stop-voting features, while surfacing useful improvements to the onboarding flow.

What I Learned

Designing Convoy taught me that the hardest coordination problems are the ones people have normalized. Everyone I interviewed had learned to live with road trip friction — nobody expected it to be better. Making that latent frustration visible through research was the most important step.

It also reinforced a principle I believe in deeply: design for the worst moment in the experience, not the best one. A road trip app needs to be usable when you're tired, behind the wheel, and the other car just took a wrong exit — not just when you're calmly planning from the couch.