Roadto100Countries: Journal App
An app for Roadto100Countries that translates the networking site into a mobile travel experience, enabling users to track visited countries, document trips, and explore curated cultural insights as they work toward their “100 countries” milestone
Overview
This project focused on translating the Roadto100Countries.com web concept into a mobile experience that makes goal‑driven, reflective travel more engaging and accessible. Over several weeks, the work produced a Figma prototype that aligned visual design, navigation, and core features (country tracking and journaling) around the needs of curious, globally minded travelers.
My Role:
-
Lead UX/UI Designer
Time:
-
Six Weeks
Tools Used:
-
Adobe Illustrator
-
Figma
Deliverables:
-
Figma Prototype
The Challenge
The main problem was that travelers were scattering their memories, photos, and reflections across multiple platforms, without a structured way to track each country they visited easily. The challenge was to design a mobile product that unifies tracking progress toward “100 countries” with meaningful introspective reflections, without overwhelming users with information or complex flows.
Research
User needs were framed around target groups like digital nomads, study‑abroad students, and travel content creators, focusing on how they document trips and what they want to remember later. An informal competitive analysis of travel logging and map apps identified gaps—especially lacking the ability to do both simultaneously—that informed decisions to emphasize country profiles, journals, and progress visualizations.
Ideas
Design exploration included creating a task flow for creating a new journal, basic low-fidelity wireframes, and testing different ways to visualize visited countries on a map and a dashboard. Multiple concepts for the “country detail” view were explored, leading to the decision to include different geographical viewpoints and a legend. Afterwards, a passport book was added to represent “pages of progress” as the user collected passport stamps.
Prototype
The final Figma prototype included:
-
An onboarding and home dashboard that highlight total countries visited, recent trips, and a clear path toward the “Road to 100” goal
-
Interactive country and world map views where users can tap into wishlist destinations
-
Passport page, country collections, and trip journal screens combining photos, notes, and structured cultural insights for each location
-
A lightweight design system with cards, badges, and iconography tailored to goal‑tracking and reflective travel documentation
Outcome & Reflection
The design clarified Roadto100Countries: Journal App as more than a simple checklist: the prototype reframed it as a personal “travel OS” where users can see their journey at a glance, reflect on trips, and explore locations as they go. By organizing navigation around clear goals (seeing the map, tracking the travel journey, and logging experiences), the app concept addressed the original problem of fragmented memories and unstructured, hard‑to‑follow country tracking.
Next time, it would be valuable to design the “task tracker” for upcoming trips (packing, bookings, must‑do experiences), so the app supports both remembering past journeys and preparing for future ones. A visible progress bar in the passport area for the “Road to 100,” deeper customization in new entries (tags, mood, trip themes) and on the map (different color stories, search, etc), and further developing the experience of the “viewpoints” feature to have more explorative options and make the experience feel more personally tailored.
Check out my other projects
lexilight
Seijaku (静寂)
TeaMuse
MD | Mekiayla Dunston
Come with me on a journey of creativity where art, design, and photography come together to tell captivating stories. Explore narratives that go beyond time, creating imaginative tales that really connect with us.