01
We made uncertainty a first-class state
Ideas can live in the itinerary without dates, without bookings, without agreement. They sit in a holding lane until someone promotes them. Nothing forces a decision before the group is ready to make one.
Nomad Atlas
- Client
- Nomad Atlas
- Discipline
- Mobile
- Year
- 2025
- Services
- Mobile App Design, Brand
02Nomad Atlas
Trip planning apps tend to be built for the end of the process — the confirmed itinerary, the neat timeline. Nomad Atlas wanted the opposite: something that held the mess in the middle, when a trip is still six half-formed ideas in a group chat.
The problem
Every competitor we looked at demanded certainty up front. Pick your dates. Pick your city. Add your first booking. Most trips don't start that way — they start as a rumour and firm up slowly, usually across several people who disagree.
The hard part was not the interface. It was designing for a document with no single author, where two people can be editing contradictory versions of the same afternoon and neither is wrong yet.
What we did
02
We tested with real groups, not individuals
Eleven groups of friends planning real trips, observed over three weeks. Solo usability testing would have missed the entire social dynamic — the deferring, the vetoing, the one person who does all the work.
03
We designed the notification restraint
A shared planning tool can become a group chat that never shuts up. We wrote explicit rules for what is worth interrupting someone for. Most changes are not.
Where it landed
4.8 on the App Store across the first eighteen months, with retention 3.2× the category benchmark for travel planning.
The behaviour we designed for showed up in the data: the median trip is created 71 days before departure and edited on 19 separate days. People are using it as the mess, not just the summary.
Results
App Store rating
Weekly retention
Product strategy
Aktays
UX & UI design
Aktays
Brand identity
Aktays
iOS & Android build
Nomad Atlas
Next project
Verse
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