Work / AllTrails
Trail comparison, side by side.
Concept project. Not affiliated with AllTrails.
A concept feature for AllTrails that puts two trails side by side, so hikers can decide between them without losing their place in the app.
About the Project
AllTrails is one of the most widely used hiking apps, with a large trail database, GPS navigation, difficulty ratings, and community reviews serving both casual walkers and experienced hikers. It is very good at helping you find a trail. It is much weaker at helping you choose between two.
That gap is why I picked it. The brief was to enhance an existing mobile app with a new feature answering a real user need, set as part of a user interaction design course at Simon Fraser University.
Research & Problem
I ran informal interviews with two hikers at opposite ends of the experience range, a regular hiker and a casual explorer, then read through online forums and app reviews to check whether their frustrations showed up at a wider scale. One did, consistently: comparing trails was inconvenient and clunky.
Both interviewees praised AllTrails' filtering and discovery tools, so the friction was not in finding trails. It started immediately after. To weigh two candidates they ended up flipping back and forth between individual trail pages, holding elevation, duration, and difficulty in memory as they went. That produced decision fatigue and slower planning at exactly the point where the app had already done the hard part of surfacing good options.
There was no efficient way to view multiple trails side by side. The gap interrupted an otherwise smooth experience, and it pointed to a contained opportunity: a comparison feature that supports the decision without adding weight to an interface people already liked.
Design Strategy
Two scenarios came out of the research, and they start from different places in the app:
- Comparing two known trails: the user already has two options and wants them directly against each other to decide.
- Validating a single trail: the user has largely chosen, and wants to confirm it holds up against similar alternatives.
That is why the feature has two entry points rather than one. Instead of building a separate flow for each scenario, I designed a single flexible comparison reachable from both the trail page and the map view, so people can compare from wherever they already are without breaking their planning process.
Feature Highlights
Trail Page Integration
A new Compare button on the trail detail page starts a comparison from the trail already on screen, and the user picks a second trail to complete the side-by-side view. This serves the validating case: you are looking at your likely choice, and checking it no longer means leaving the page.
Map View Integration
From the map, tapping trail pins lets the user select multiple trails to compare. A condensed summary shows distance, elevation, difficulty, and estimated time in place, so the comparison happens without navigating away from the map that gives those trails their geographic context.
Validation
I brought back the same hikers from the research interviews for usability walkthroughs, and asked each of them to use the new feature to compare two trails they were actually interested in.
The walkthroughs were there to validate the feature rather than to start another round of iteration. They did that, and no changes were made afterwards.
Impact
The side-by-side view cuts comparing two trails from 6 steps to 2, and the whole comparison now happens inside AllTrails.
Before: 6 steps
- Open AllTrails and find the first trail
- Find the second trail
- Google the first trail for more detail
- Google the second trail
- Switch between the tabs
- Compare distance, elevation, and difficulty from memory
After: 2 steps
- Open a trail on AllTrails and tap Compare
- Select the second trail, and both appear side by side
Reflection
The real exercise here was designing inside someone else's product. I had to study how AllTrails is already put together and make the feature feel native to its design language rather than bolted onto it.
The limited scope helped. It kept me on the core value, reducing friction in trail comparison, instead of widening the brief. The concept looks simple from the outside, but it raised the harder questions: where the entry points belong, what the user actually intends at each one, and how to add functionality to a product whose simplicity is part of why people like it.
With more room, I would explore comparing more than two trails, and deeper integration with saved favorites and list-building.
This project sharpened how I identify pain points, translate them into user needs, and turn those into practical features that improve an everyday decision.