Background

In Portland, Oregon, social bike rides are at the heart of the city’s cycling culture. The community-run site shift2bikes.org serves as the central hub for ride listings, and during the annual Pedalpalooza festival, more than 800 themed rides take place over the summer months.

However, because the site is run by volunteers with limited resources, it offers only basic features. Rides are listed as text with addresses, making it difficult to filter, visualize, or plan logistics across such a large calendar of events.

I set out to design a mobile experience that would make finding, organizing, and attending rides more intuitive and fun.

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The Problem

Through informal feedback and firsthand experience, I uncovered several challenges with the existing system:

• No map view: Rides are displayed only as addresses, making it hard to visualize locations or plan multiple rides in a day.
• No ride organization tools: Many riders resorted to their Notes app to remember which rides they wanted to attend.
• No search functionality: Users had to scroll through daily listings, making it especially difficult to find recurring rides from year to year.
  

These issues caused missed opportunities, confusion around logistics, and frustration when trying to engage with Portland’s vibrant biking scene.

My Role

This was an independent project where I worked alone for the entire process. I was responsible for research, design, development, and community engagement.

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Discovery

To better understand rider needs, I conducted qualitative interviews during group rides. I asked participants about their habits, frustrations, and what they wished for when navigating the ride calendar.

From this, I created three personas that captured the most common user archetypes:

• Katie (30, local veteran rider): Attends 1–3 rides a week during the summer, knows the city well, and wants quick access to her favorite recurring rides.
• Lance (23, newcomer): Just moved to Portland, wants to make friends through biking, but doesn’t know the city or ride types yet.
• Julia (42, parent): Brings her two kids on family-friendly rides, prioritizing safety, slower pace, and kid-centered activities.

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Design Process

Because I was working solo, I took advantage of a simultaneous design–build workflow. I designed and prototyped directly in SwiftUI, iterating quickly while maintaining a native look using mostly standard iOS components and icons.

From Research to Requirements

After synthesizing rider interviews, I distilled the needs of my three personas into actionable design requirements:

• Katie needed an easy way to track favorite recurring rides without scrolling endlessly.
• Lance needed orientation support like maps and search to make sense of an overwhelming event list.
• Julia needed confidence that rides would be safe and feasible with kids, which meant prominently featuring the Adults Only and Family Friendly audience tags provided by the shift2bikes API
  

This step ensured that the solution wasn’t just addressing “general frustrations,” but was specifically tied to real riders’ goals.

Prototyping in Code

Because I was the sole designer and developer, I skipped static wireframes in Figma and moved directly into SwiftUI prototyping. This let me test ideas in the actual environment where users would interact with them, and enabled quick in-person tests of functional prototypes. This approach was also beneficial when small group of riders volunteered to use the app during its alpha stages and provide feedback from their real-world usage.

I created lightweight prototypes of:

• A map view with tappable pins for each ride, which made it easy to evaluate usability of dense clusters of rides.
• A sequential list view of all rides happening that day, allowing the user to scan ride titles and start times.
• A bookmarking flow, experimenting with whether saving should feel like “favorites” (heart icon) or “organization” (bookmark icon). Testing with riders revealed that the bookmark metaphor was clearer and aligned with their mental model of “saving things for later.”
• Search behavior, validating whether riders expected to search by ride name only or also within ride descriptions. Most expected both, so I designed the local caching system to index the full content of ride listings.

Iteration Through Use

Since my test users were fellow cyclists, I conducted live testing during rides by asking them to plan their next ride using the prototype. Observing them scroll, tap, and sometimes misinterpret functions provided insights I could immediately fold back into the design. For example:

• Riders often tapped map pins expecting to see more than just the starting location, which led me to integrate route visualizations when available.
• Some users worried about forgetting rides they had saved, which validated the need for notification reminders tied to saved rides.

Balancing UX with Technical Constraints

The volunteer-run API powering shift2bikes.org has no support for geocoordinates or search. To meet user expectations, I designed solutions within these limits:

• On-device geocoding of addresses into map points.
• Local caching to support fast, offline-friendly search.
• Background detection of RideWithGPS links, pulling in richer data when available.
  

These decisions allowed the app to deliver a polished, user-friendly experience even though the data source was limited.

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Solution

Map-first Experience

The home screen displays rides for the current day as pins on a map. I used Apple’s geocoding service to convert starting addresses into coordinates on the fly. If a ride included a linked RideWithGPS route, the app automatically detected and imported it, displaying the full planned route. This gave riders a better sense of logistics, especially when chaining rides together.

Saved Rides

From any ride detail view, users can tap a bookmark button to save it. Saved rides appear in their own tab and support optional reminders to help riders avoid missing events.

Search

I cached upcoming rides locally, enabling fast keyword search across titles and descriptions. The familiar pull-down search bar in iOS lists makes the feature feel intuitive and system-native.

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Results & Impact

The Bike Fun App quickly proved its value within Portland’s biking community, giving riders a more intuitive way to discover and plan social rides. What started as an independent side project has grown into a widely used tool endorsed by the very organization it was designed to support.

Key outcomes:

• 8,000+ downloads since launch
• Official endorsement from Shift and promotion on their website
• First-ever search and mapping function for rides, unavailable on the original site
  

Beyond the numbers, the app has reshaped how people participate in Pedalpalooza and other rides throughout the year. Mapping ride start points and routes helps riders plan their bicycle outing without logistical headaches. The ability to bookmark and set reminders means participants no longer need to rely on ad-hoc notes apps. And for longtime riders, search makes it easy to reconnect with recurring favorites year after year.

Ultimately, the app lowers barriers to entry for newcomers while giving seasoned riders smarter planning tools—helping more people experience Portland’s vibrant social bike culture.

Reflection & Next Steps

Building this app was both a technical and design exercise in solving a very real community need. Because the Shift2Bikes website is volunteer-run and resource-limited, I saw an opportunity to create something lightweight but high-impact. The result was an app that didn’t just mirror the website, but reimagined the experience around discovery, planning, and participation. This project reaffirmed for me that good UX design isn’t always about inventing something new but rather that it’s about listening carefully, understanding real-world constraints, and finding the smartest way to deliver value within them.

Future improvements I’d like to explore:

• Weekly schedule view: A redesigned “Saved” tab to visualize upcoming rides in weekly calendar format, making it easier to plan and avoid conflicts.
• Faster onboarding: The app currently displays a loading interstitial on first launch while caching upcoming rides, I’d like to refactor this process to be asynchronous for a smoother initial experience.