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PLOT is a social app about places. You keep a map of the world, with the places you want to go and the places you've been on it, and follow other people's: friends and influencers, the onboarding says. There was no client: we designed it ourselves in 2023, one of two in-house travel concepts that year; the other was WanderWith.
I designed the identity and Prakash Ghodke developed the screens. The idea was to give people, including creators sharing recommendations with their followers, a personal map that someone else could use. We never built PLOT. The designs show how saving a place, visiting it and recommending it could belong to the same product.
The whole idea fits in two buttons
The onboarding calls it "your very own to-do list for the world." That gives the map a purpose before there is anything on it: somewhere to put the places you want to experience, then a record of the ones you have.
Every place has two actions. Plot on Map saves somewhere you want to go. Checked-off records that you went, and puts a tick in its pin. Saving a recommendation and reporting a visit remain different actions, even though they refer to the same place. The map can hold both.
wanting to go and having been are different things to share
Every pin is coloured by what you'd do there
A map full of recommendations needs a way to narrow the choice. Places fall into four categories, Eat, Drink, Shop and Sleep. Each has a colour that runs through its filter, pin and place card. Selecting Eat leaves the green restaurant pins; the same category is recognisable before and after opening a place.
Search keeps that geographic context. The pizza results stay on the map, with a card for the selected restaurant along the bottom. You can compare where the options are without moving back and forth between a results list and a separate map.
A place page ends in a way to get there
The place page brings a recommendation close to something you can act on. The map stays at the top, followed by photos and the people who have visited. Under the two PLOT actions sit Directions, Book, Call and Website. Someone ready to go can get directions or contact the place from the same screen where they decided it was worth saving.
Discovery also has to work before someone knows what to search for. The empty search screen offers recent searches, popular places nearby and Collections by PLOT, alongside the search field.
The feed is made of check-offs
A visit creates the material for discovery. Each feed item is someone checking a place off, with photos and the place attached. A restaurant post includes its city, food tags and price indicator. The recommendation stays connected to a destination that the next person can put on their own map.
Your profile is your map
The profile makes the collected places useful to other people. Under the bio and social links, it opens on the person's map, with category filters and city shortcuts. Someone following a creator for restaurant recommendations can go straight to the relevant city and category.
Below the map, cities become cards showing how many places the person has visited. Opening London gives it a dedicated map and place list. The profile can represent a whole travel history while still letting a reader look for somewhere to eat in one city.
Your own profile adds Edit Profile, while the map and city structure stay the same. Share sits at the top. The collection is ready to pass on as a map, rather than leaving followers to reconstruct a list of recommendations from separate posts.
Where it went
We never built it. The settings footer dates the exercise: "Part of Never Before Seen Group, © 2023". In July 2024 I published a landing page for Travelpad, an AI tool for discovering and planning travel, which grew out of PLOT and WanderWith.
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