Niue
Instagram shows you where people went. Niue is built around the question a caption can't quite give: how did you actually do this, and was it worth it? It turns inspiration into an itinerary someone else can act on, remix, and make their own, adds a social layer where following someone means trading real, usable travel experience, and stays with you into the trip through a real-time mode that keeps the plan alive while you are on the ground.
A social platform where people share how to experience a trip, not just where they went.
Young travelers are told to travel more, not just save more. Niue helps them do both by making the hidden cost and decision-making side of a trip visible and shareable, instead of something you only discover after the fact. Following someone stops being passive scrolling and becomes an actual exchange of usable travel experience.
People already ask each other for their itineraries, screenshot by screenshot. Niue turns that whole scramble into a follow and a one-tap remix.
Macro decisions are already solved. The trip lives in the micro ones.
Flights, hotels, and which city to visit are easy to research; plenty of tools own that layer. The decisions that actually make a trip memorable are the small ones, and they are the hardest to plan and the easiest to get wrong.
Flights, hotels, cities
Comparable, searchable, and well served by existing apps. Not where the opportunity is.
Which cafe, which viewpoint, which side of the lake
The in-between moments other apps ignore. Niue turns the space between major activities into part of the experience instead of dead time, and captures how one small decision cascades into the next.
Close the loop that every other travel app leaves open.
Inspiration, planning, documenting, and ranking each have a great app, but none connect all four into a single loop. Niue's goal was to make the follow, remix, plan, and post loop the product itself, built on three bets.
Remixing
Any public itinerary, from anyone, can be copied and reshaped: swap stops, dates, and vibe in a tap. Every remix keeps credit to the original source, so a stranger's trip becomes your starting skeleton.
Social
Following, group voting, and post-trip documentation in one place. Your life and travels become a personal island; visiting someone's island means seeing their trips in full, usable detail.
Micro-decisions
Every major or minor choice can carry attached alternatives: price tiers, weather-dependent options, underground versus mainstream, suggested by other users or AI, and settled by granular group voting.
Built from the apps people already love.
A big goal was to make Niue easy to pick up on day one. Instead of inventing new patterns, I borrowed the single strongest habit from each app people already use, so almost nothing has to be learned.
Hinge-style prompts
Profile prompts that make a page feel like a person, not just a list of trips.
Tinder-style swiping
Swipe to drop activities into an itinerary, fast and one-handed.
Beli rankings and map
Comparative rankings and a World View map instead of flat five-star ratings.
Instagram feed
A familiar Following and Trending feed as the home base.
TikTok-style posting
Short-form capture and creation to document a trip as it happens.
Each app is strong at one stage. None connect them.
Mapping the field clarified what Niue needs to own. Every competitor is excellent at exactly one part of the travel cycle, whether inspiring, planning, documenting, or ranking, but the handoffs between them are broken.
Remixing as a first-class feature
Extended to any public itinerary from anyone, not just plans you already own.
Tiered alternatives
Every decision can carry attached options: price tier, weather, style, suggested by people or AI.
Granular group voting
Big-picture votes are separated from minor ones, so a group can split off and reconverge instead of being forced onto one path.
In-the-moment utility
Location-aware picks, weather-triggered nudges, and what others did here keep it useful during a trip, not just before.
The trip does not end at the itinerary.
Most travel apps stop after you finish planning. Niue's real-time layer keeps working while you are on the ground: it reads weather, crowds, budget, and what people nearby are doing, then folds it back into the plan you already made, so the itinerary stays alive instead of frozen.
Live gap-filling
When an open gap shows up in a trip that is already underway, a swipe deck of activities matched to your preferences appears. Swipe one in and it drops into the plan with a suggested time.
Near you, ranked for you
Location-aware picks plus a live map that color-codes spots as underrated, overrated, or most-loved for your taste, each one tappable straight into the itinerary.
Weather, crowds, and transit
Nudges to lock in a plan when a good window opens, plus crowd forecasts, transit delays, and local alerts like wildfire smoke, all in one place.
An AI companion in the moment
Context-aware advice on the best time to hit a place given weather, holidays, and how busy it will be, and a heads-up the moment the plan is about to hit friction.
A budget that keeps count
Live spend against your budget, surfacing alternative places to explore wherever you still have room to spend.
Decide together, on the fly
From the group chat, a live poll turns one person's idea into a group vote that writes straight into the itinerary. Groups can split up and reconverge without losing the plan.
The design process
The product moved through three fidelities, each testing the follow, remix, plan, and post loop before adding the visual detail.
Design sketches
Before opening Figma I worked the whole loop out on paper and a whiteboard: trip mode, the home feed and reels, itinerary viewing and place cards, and how group planning, posting, and customization fit together.
Layout, hierarchy, and flows
Real components and copy: how alternatives stack on a decision, how a personal choice becomes a group vote, and how remixing preserves credit.
The visual system
The foundations and components that tie the app together: color, type, spacing, and the core UI pieces.
The end result
Final visual language: the teal-sand island theme, real images, and the micro-interactions that make remixing feel like a single tap.
Click through the loop.
An interactive Figma prototype of the follow, remix, plan, and post flow.
The differentiation is the loop, not any single feature.
The takeaway
Every app in the set is strong at one stage of the travel cycle. Instagram inspires, Wanderlog plans, FindPenguins documents, Beli ranks. None connect all four into a single, continuous loop where a piece of inspiration can be remixed into a real, plannable trip, lived out, documented, and fed back for the next person.
This is why my goal for Niue is to combine everything together. It is that the follow, remix, plan, and post loop is the product itself, with the micro-decision layer, tiered alternatives, granular group voting, and AI companion all built specifically to make that loop fast, social, and genuinely usable.
Overall this project was really fun to make! It started with a problem I personally experienced and wanted to solve, so seeing it turn into an actual design product is definitely worthwhile.
Want the full walkthrough?
Happy to talk through the research behind Niue, the remix system, or where I would take it next.