Streamlining Mobile Navigation Through Context-Aware Design
TIMELINE
10 weeks
Mar 2025
TEAM
Luca Pfister
Tyler Shin
Jenny Hoang
Winston Jeffries
ROLE
Product Designer
Visual Designer
SKILLS
Interaction Design
Visual Design
Prototyping
Product Thinking
THE CHALLENGE
The problem of mobile use in motion
Navigating while traveling can be a stressful experience. Users are juggling multiple apps, inputting directions, and responding to texts all at the same time. This creates a fragmented, distracting mobile experience that compromises both safety and focus.
THE WHY
System responsiveness lags behind user intent
Today’s mobile systems often miss the mark. Even when users have a clear goal, phones cannot pick up on that intent or act on it. Instead, users are left to piece things together themselves, juggling swipes, multitasking, and precise gestures that feel clunky and demanding, especially when they are in motion.
THE SOLUTION
Frictionless travel with iOS Travel Mode
A context-aware mobile experience that users can activate while on the go—streamlining key actions, surfacing smart suggestions, and reducing distractions to support safer, more efficient travel.
RESEARCH & IDEATION
Building on proven patterns to design for motion, intent, and safety
We built on the strengths of:
iOS Focus Modes
Dynamic Island
Smart Stack Widgets
…but extended them to address motion-specific usability and real-time user intent.
We conducted secondary research across five domains to inform our design:
DESIGN DECISIONS
Actionable Smart Suggestions
Smart Suggestions reduce friction between intent and action by surfacing what users likely want to do next.
We grounded this feature in key design principles:
Recognition over recall: Users choose from surfaced actions instead of remembering steps.
User control: Suggestions can be ignored, pinned, or rearranged—never enforced.
Semantic directness: Each action maps clearly to user intent.
Research shows that users prefer suggestive systems over unpredictable adaptive ones. Fully adaptive interfaces often fail due to low predictability and user trust.
Smart Suggestions allow users to:
Multi-task without switching apps
Preview or pin actions for later
Only see the most relevant information at a glance
It’s a mental and visual decluttering of the mobile experience.
DESIGN DECISIONS
Optimized Gesture Interaction
We prioritized fast, low-effort input methods that work even on-the-go:
Large tap targets for bumpy environments
Voice input for hands-free interaction
No swipes or long-presses - just direct, one-tap access
Quick previews before committing to actions
Justified by interaction design principles: fewer gesture steps, minimal movement, and task chunking all improve travel usability.
DESIGN DECISIONS
Ergonomics & Efficiency in Motion
We avoided gestures like long-presses or swipes, which fail in motion-heavy contexts.
Instead, we focused on:
One-step actions
Clear mapping between what you see and what you can do
Reduced app-switching through consolidated surfaces
We drew from research on movement-aware UI, pedestrian safety, and map-specific interaction stressors.
EXPLORATIONS
Identifying edge cases and refining the experience for real-world movement and variability
The core experience works well, but real-world use always reveals new challenges. We noticed that some gestures ended up covering important parts of the screen, so rethinking where interactive elements live became a priority. Relying only on visual feedback wasn’t always enough, especially when people were moving, which opened the door for things like haptics or sound cues. We also saw that posture and movement affected how reliably gestures worked—reminding us that context really matters, and the interface should be able to adapt to it.
NEXT STEPS
From concept to real-world impact
To bring Travel Mode to life, the next step is developing our interactive prototype and testing it with people on the move. We want to see how it holds up in real situations—looking at things like how quickly users can complete tasks and how much less they need to interact with their screens. We're also excited to explore what's next, like adding haptic feedback through wearables, tailoring the experience for cyclists and drivers, and making sure it's accessible to everyone, no matter the platform.
LIVE DEMO
Try it out!
Curious to see it in action? Give the interactive demo a spin and let me know what you think!