Compass

Planning a route, be it for a road trip or a longer bike ride, can be a tedious process. It involves finding inspiration on social media or blogs, using documents or a bookmark manager to collect everything in a central place, and then leveraging online mapping services to calculate the actual route. The current experience is fragmented, involving a lot of back-and-forth between a broad variety of services. AI tools like Google Gemini or ChatGPT make the user's life a little easier by quickly aggregating information from around the web. However, they mostly provide one-shot text answers that fail to capture the joy of discovering and exploring new places.

Compass aims to solve this by connecting location-based fragments from around the web to create personal routes.

The core of the service is a 4-directional feed that mimics a compass and allows the user to explore and save new route fragments based on their location.

A hand holding a futuristic smartphone. The screen shows a route created with the Compass app

Compass generates routes that reflect the user's collected content and a set of personal preferences like length, difficulty, or setting.

A route created with the Compass service

Route planning

Unlike other route planning services Compass doesn’t put the map front and center, but rather presents routes in a more visual way. Maps still exist, but they mostly serve as a way to confirm the final route. So instead of moving around rather abstract pins on a map, the user can add or remove individual route fragments, thereby altering the experience in a tangible way. Compass' ultimate goal was to deliver a quick and automated approach to route planning while always allowing the user to understand and tweak the data points involved.

Divided into four distinct sections, the app enables the user to quickly switch between collecting new fragments and organizing them into routes.

While the approach to route planning is highly unique, organizing and sharing content relies on patterns also found in other content aggregation services. This creates familiarity and strikes a balance with more experimental features like the eponymous compass.