Designing the decision before the outing

Imagine an unexpected hour free in an unfamiliar city. You open Maps, browse nearby attractions, check a few ratings, look through photographs, compare travel times, and eventually narrow down your options. By the time you’ve found somewhere interesting, you’ve already spent a good part of that hour deciding.

The problem isn’t necessarily a lack of recommendations. It’s the effort required to turn those recommendations into a decision. Most discovery experiences are built around exploration: lists, filters, categories, and hundreds of possibilities. That works when someone wants to research their options, but spontaneous outings create a different kind of need.

What’s Next was Intripid’s response to that moment. Originally called On-the-Go, the product was conceived as a mobile experience for discovering nearby restaurants, attractions, activities, and experiences through personalized recommendations. As the founding product designer, I worked on translating that vision into an experience that felt immediate, approachable, and useful in the moment.

How might we help someone choose a nearby place without researching every option?

The product brief established an important constraint: instead of displaying another list of results, What’s Next would present one recommendation at a time. That simplified what the person saw, but it also made the design problem more demanding. A traditional list lets people compare several places simultaneously. A single recommendation removes that comparison, placing more responsibility on the relevance of each suggestion and the information presented with it.

My focus was on how those needs came together in the interface, not on making the recommendation card visually attractive in isolation.

The first design decision was about information hierarchy. With only one place occupying the screen, the experience needed to answer more than “Does this look interesting?” It also needed to help someone judge whether the place was practical for their current outing.

I organized the recommendation around three layers of information. First, make the place recognizable: large, immersive photography gives the recommendation an immediate sense of place. Rather than treating a destination as another row in a results list, the visual becomes the focal point of the experience.

Then, make the visit understandable. The place name, rating, approximate cost, and travel time appear together, giving someone a quick way to assess the option beyond its appearance. These are small pieces of information, but they answer different questions: Is it worth considering? Does it fit my budget? How much effort would getting there require?

Finally, make the next step explicit. The prominent “Go here” action separates appreciating a recommendation from deciding to visit it. I wanted the transition from discovery to action to be recognizable without requiring someone to navigate through a series of details screens.

Giving recommendations a reason

The interface also introduced a dedicated “Why we chose this place for you” section. The intention was to make recommendations feel less arbitrary by giving people a short, understandable explanation for why a place might be relevant.

A useful explanation should connect the recommendation to the outing rather than merely repeat a venue description. For example, knowing that Hawa Mahal is a famous landmark tells someone what it is. Knowing that it is a relatively quick cultural stop helps explain why it might suit the moment. This distinction matters because recommendation quality isn’t communicated through a rating alone.

The trade-off is about placement. An image-led screen makes discovery engaging, but it can also place practical information and recommendation reasoning behind the visual appeal. In this design, the explanation sits below the primary action row. That keeps the initial presentation focused, but creates an important question for future evaluation: should the reason for a recommendation appear closer to the decision itself?

Once someone encounters a recommendation, several different intentions become possible. They might want to visit immediately. They might like the place but prefer to save it for another day. They might want more information, share it with someone, or simply move on. Treating all of these as a single positive or negative response would make a fast interface less useful.

The product brief proposed a gesture-based discovery model: swiping left to dismiss a place, right to save it, and up to inspect additional details. My interaction-design challenge was to make this model work alongside visible actions, so the experience did not depend entirely on someone discovering or remembering the gestures.

The recommendation screen places “Go here” at the center of the action row, with supporting icon-based controls around it. That makes the decision to navigate visually distinct from the lighter actions surrounding it. Only “Go here” explicitly names its outcome. The checkmark and plus affordances in the historical design introduce ambiguity, and this is an interaction I would revisit to make every action’s consequence obvious before someone taps.

A useful recommendation isn’t always one you visit

An important part of the experience was accounting for places someone might want to remember. The supporting profile design separates places into wishlist, visited, and avoided categories. Those categories represent different relationships with a recommendation: a saved place is still a possibility; a visited place is history; an avoided place is something ruled out. Keeping these states separate gives the experience a more meaningful structure than a single collection of liked places.

The original product specification also considered recovering dismissed recommendations. That is an essential safety net for a one-at-a-time discovery model: moving past something quickly shouldn’t mean losing it forever.

A recommendation can be appealing and still be impractical. Someone with a free afternoon might happily travel across the city. Someone with only 30 minutes available may consider the same place too far away. That makes travel appetite an important part of local discovery.

The original brief included location, distance, category, and budget as inputs for finding relevant places. Rather than exposing every possible filtering option on the recommendation screen, the design gives people a dedicated place to manage their preferences.

Letting people define how far they’re willing to go

One of the more interesting controls in the profile is the travel-distance preference. The person can set how far away recommendations should be, making an otherwise invisible search boundary understandable and adjustable. Alongside it, I designed a separate option to consider places slightly farther away when nearby recommendations run out. Setting a preferred distance establishes the default limit. Allowing them to opt into a wider search gives flexibility without treating that limit as irrelevant.

The profile brings together the travel radius, preference settings, wishlist, and separate visited and avoided categories. These elements give discovery somewhere to continue beyond an individual recommendation card. My design focus was the user-facing side of that experience: making the available information understandable and providing clear ways to express preferences.

The design was completed in approximately one week, and Intripid publicly announced What’s Next as a live product. Within that short design window, I translated a broad local-discovery brief into a focused mobile experience built around three connected ideas: a recommendation should contain enough context to be evaluated; exploring an option should remain separate from committing to it; and people should be able to influence the boundaries of what gets recommended.

What remained unproven

Although the product was publicly launched, I don’t have verified behavioral metrics showing whether people made decisions faster, visited more recommended places, or returned more frequently. The release establishes that the experience was delivered, not that its central hypothesis was validated. The most valuable next step would be to understand what happens after a recommendation appears: whether people act on it, save it for later, or continue browsing because they still don’t have enough confidence to choose.

Reflection

Reducing the number of choices doesn’t automatically make choosing easier. When an interface shows one option at a time, the quality of the information, the clarity of the available actions, and the person’s ability to remain in control become more important.

What’s Next was a small product experience, developed under a short design timeline, but it presented a meaningful design challenge: how to help someone move from discovering a possibility to deciding whether it deserves their time. Because finding somewhere interesting is only half the decision.