Polarsteps is a travel tracking app that lets users plan trips by creating itineraries & exploring recommendations, and document their trips with notes & images on an interactive map.
This critique evaluates key interactions in the iOS app using concepts from “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman – such as affordances, signifiers, mappings and conceptual models – to analyse how they shape the travel tracking experience.
Screen 1: Interactive Map
This entry screen features an interactive map of the planet with a quick overview of all the user’s collected trips, a “Settings” button in the top-right, a bottom sheet displaying the user’s profile and a bottom navigation with a search field and links to other sections of the app.
The interactive map establishes a robust conceptual model, instantly communicating the app’s core purpose to the user: organisation and collection of all trip details.
When zoomed out, the “globe” affords horizontal spinning, panning, and zooming via standard two-finger pinch gestures to navigate the map. A “physical” constraint prevents vertical globe rotation, restricting movement to a horizontal axis. This doubles as a semantic constraint that mimics physical 3D globes, using skeuomorphic design principles to make digital interactions feel familiar.
Photo pins marking past trip locations serve as signifiers, signaling where users can tap or zoom in to view detailed content. Dynamic text labels for continents, countries, and states appear as the user zooms in. Relying on knowledge in the world eliminates the need to recall geographic details from memory (knowledge in the head), reducing the user’s cognitive load.
However, when zoomed out, pins on the far side of the globe are completely hidden. Adding arrows or a subtle glow around the horizon would serve as a signifier to prompt users to rotate the globe towards the available pins.
Screen 2: “Me” page
Revealed by pulling up the bottom sheet, it features an overview of the user’s profile and allows users to navigate to whichever section suits their immediate needs.
The bottom sheet affords vertical dragging. Tapping the map collapses it fully, swiping up once reveals the “above the fold” user profile content, with a second swipe expanding the full page, which allows the user to scroll further. A gray handle at the top acts as a signifier that the sheet is expandable, reflecting the behavioural (second) level of emotional design, as this is a conventional UI element and relies upon previously learned user behaviour.
Upon expanding full-screen, the drag handle is replaced by a downward chevron icon in the top-left corner (the standard position for a “back” button). This is not only a button which affords being pressed, but also acts as a signifier, indicating that tapping or swiping downwards will also return the bottom sheet to its previous collapsed state. This provides feedback to the user that they have reached the fully expanded “Me” page.
Adding a number displaying the total number of past trips would be a minor change, but would be a great improvement to the user experience, providing more context to the user, based on Norman’s explanation of “knowledge in the world.”
Screen 3: Trip Overview
Tapping on a thumbnail for a “past trip” brings up a close-up map view of each destination from the trip, and lets users review the content from each day of their trip.
The carousel with thumbnails representing each day in the trip, along with the progress bar with the car icon and text label enhances the user’s mental model since most western cultures perceive time linearly from left to right (just like this text you’re reading), allowing user to instantly understand how content from past trips is organised, and how to navigate & retrieve the desired information.
The progress bar displays the active day (e.g., “Day 6”) in the bottom slider navigation, providing intuitive mapping between the user’s horizontal scrolling and events of the trip. Swiping the bottom slider also repositions the map view to center on the corresponding photo pin from that day, mapping the user’s choice to the results appearing onscreen.
Each thumbnail in the slider explicitly labels the day, date, location name and photo count so users can avoid having to mentally recall and keep track of complex itineraries, relying on the information onscreen (knowledge in the world) instead.
While the progress bar displays the active day (e.g., “Day 6”) it hides total trip length (e.g., “Day 6 of 11”), forcing users to rely on memory (knowledge in the head). Adding further context (knowledge in the world) to the text label, or adding visual indicators to the progress bar would be an improvement.
Polarsteps successfully translates complex, personal travel data into seamless user experience by applying many concepts presented by Norman, such as using signifiers to guide discoverability and presenting cohesive conceptual models to the user. Though a few minor improvements could be implemented, the app makes planning and documenting one’s travel a delightful experience.