Next Route — Case Study

Live Prototype

Watch the handoff happen

Built for the Toyota Tacoma Trailhead's 14-inch display. This is the real, working prototype — scrub the distance-to-trailhead slider and watch it switch from Drive to Park on its own.

Interactive prototype embedded live from Vercel Open full screen

The Problem

Three legs. Three apps. No handoff.

Getting from your driveway to the trail is really three journeys — Driving, Parked, and Trailhead. Each leg already has a great tool. The trouble is that none of them hands you to the next one. The friction doesn't live inside any single app. It lives in the seams between them.

Leg 01 · Driving

Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze

World-class turn-by-turn — right up until "You have arrived." They route you to a pin in a parking lot, then go quiet. They never knew a hike was the whole point of the drive.

Leg 02 · Parked

No one owns this moment

The dead zone. You close nav, pick up your phone, and rebuild your context by hand — often with no signal. This is where the screen time and the second-guessing pile up.

Leg 03 · Trailhead

AllTrails, Gaia GPS, onX Backcountry

Deep, trustworthy trail data — but you set it up standing in the lot with your phone out, and it never knew how you got there or how much daylight you have left.

Every leg is solved. The transitions are not. Next Route is designed for the two handoffs nobody owns — driving → parked, and parked → trailhead.

Design Challenge

How might we make the move from driving to the trail feel like one continuous experience — so the driver never has to manage the handoff themselves?

The Solution · Motion

The one moment: 2 miles out, it switches itself

Next Route watches your distance to the trailhead. At 2 miles out, it fires a single, automatic transition. The driving layer — map, turn, telemetry — recedes. The parked layer surfaces in its place: trail summary, daylight remaining, elevation, and the actions you'll actually want. No tap, no app-switch. By the time you pull into the lot, the screen is already showing what you need at the trailhead — so your eyes go back up and your phone stays in your pocket.

Driving · Recede

map, turn, telemetry · 380ms

Parked · Surface

layer in · 260→640ms

Tier 1 · Bloom

zero-tap data · 300→920ms

Tier 2 · Bloom

supporting · 370→990ms

Tier 3 · Bloom

actions · 440→1060ms

0300ms600ms900ms1200ms

Driving accelerates out (cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 1, 1)) because it is finished. Parked decelerates in (cubic-bezier(0.16, 1, 0.3, 1)) because you are about to read it standing still. The stagger order is the content architecture, not decoration — tier 1 is what you read with zero taps, tier 3 is what you might deliberately touch. Nothing else in this product animates. One state machine, one meaningful motion moment.

The Payoff · Steps

From five manual steps to two

The handoff used to be a checklist you ran yourself in the parking lot. Next Route does the transition for you, so only the human decisions are left.

The manual handoff · 5 steps

01Close turn-by-turn navigation once you've "arrived"
02Pick up your phone and unlock it
03Open a hiking app and search for the trail again
04Check conditions and download the offline map — before you lose signal
05Text someone your plan and note a return time

With Next Route · 2 steps

01Drive. At 2 miles out, nav recedes and the trailhead surfaces on its own — offline map already cached
02Park. It's all there — one tap to Send to watch, Share plan, or Set return time

For the Trailhead

What this gives the person heading out

"Trailheads" are the people who use this — the ones going from the driver's seat to the dirt. Reducing steps isn't the point; it's what those steps were costing them.

Eyes up in the lot

You arrive already oriented. No fumbling for your phone, no re-searching the trail — the transition already happened while you were still driving.

A plan you didn't assemble

Daylight remaining, turnaround time, elevation, and an offline map cached before you lost service — waiting for you instead of built by you.

Safety by default

Return time set, plan shared, watch synced — the steps people skip when it's manual now happen as part of parking. Being off the trail before dark stops being a maybe.

The car hands you to the trail

Drive, park, and walk feel like one continuous experience instead of three disconnected apps. The product earns its place by disappearing at exactly the right moment.

Roadmap

What's next — V1.1

V1 is the in-dash experience above. V1.1 follows quickly, extending Next Route off the dashboard and onto the trail.

Mobile

The trail in your pocket — live map, trail distance, and elevation profile, so the route comes with you once you leave the truck.

Watch

Tracks hiking and running data on the move — plus time-of-day notifications so you're never caught on the trail after dark.