Trekking Carpathians
A mobile app and website that spread the culture of mountain tourism in the Ukrainian Carpathians.
Find routes, connect with other hikers, track your progress and get the information that matters on the trail — in one clear, consistent product.
Spreading a culture, not just shipping an app.
The product’s goal is bigger than a feature set — to popularize responsible tourism in the Ukrainian Carpathians. It had to serve first-time hikers and seasoned travelers alike.
Routes, community and progress tracking all needed to live in one place, without overwhelming anyone who just wanted to find a trail.
A capable app that had grown hard to read.
The old product packed in features, but buried them.
Poor information visualization
Weak hierarchy made the platform hard to perceive and slowed the target action.
Too many scattered functions
A range of features competed for attention and confused users.
No shared system
Screens were built ad-hoc, so consistency and development speed suffered.
One environment, many jobs
Routes, activities and community had to coexist without noise.
Interview, restructure, systematize.
Discovery & interviews
I ran user interviews with hikers to understand how they choose routes, track hikes and share experiences. The insights shaped a new information architecture.
Restructured navigation
Simplified the paths to the core action — finding a route — and grouped community, activities and posts into one coherent environment with filtering.
Design system
Built a reusable system (typography, color, components) so new designs ship quickly and stay consistent, and engineers can assemble screens without losing intent.
Three calls that shaped the redesign.
Put the route first
Everything else — community, activities, tracking — supports the core job of finding and understanding a route. I cut steps and noise around it.
Simplified navigation let users find the right route up to 3× faster.
One community environment
Community, activities and posts now live together with filtering, so travelers find relevant answers in the same place they plan and log hikes.
A system, not one-off screens
A custom design system kept the visual language consistent and sped up delivery across both the app and the companion website.
Clearer, faster, more consistent.
Users find the desired route up to 3× faster thanks to simplified navigation.
Community and activities unified into one filterable environment — relevant answers are easier to find.
A reusable design system that speeds up future development and keeps the UI consistent.
A companion website extends the product to the web.
From a cluttered app to a clear trail companion.
The redesign proved that in a feature-rich product, structure and a shared system move the numbers more than piling on features.
