Create Route

About

MapMyRun

I

Dec 2021

Create Route is one of MapMyRun’s core experiences, giving runners the ability to plan, customize, save, and share routes before they ever hit the road.

With 7,000+ daily page visits, redesigning such an established tool meant balancing two competing needs: making route creation dramatically easier while preserving the power and flexibility existing users relied on.

The Challenge

Create Route had accumulated years of functionality. The result was a powerful tool, but one that exposed too many controls at once and made a relatively simple task—planning a run—feel unnecessarily complex.

Our goal wasn’t simply to give the experience a visual refresh. We wanted to rethink how and when functionality appeared.

I focused the redesign around three principles:

Make the experience contextual.
Surface tools when they’re relevant instead of displaying every option at once.
Reduce unnecessary decisions.
Use smart defaults to simplify common actions, particularly when saving a route.
Be willing to remove functionality.

We challenged legacy features that were unreliable, rarely useful, or added complexity without meaningfully improving the core route-building experience.

Rethinking the Route- Building Experience

The existing experience treated every tool as equally important, regardless of where someone was in the route-building process.

I reorganized the experience around the task at hand. Instead of asking users to navigate a dense set of controls, the interface progressively surfaced relevant actions as they built their route.

This reduced visual complexity while keeping advanced functionality accessible when runners needed it.

Making complex tools contextual

Bringing route creation to mobile

The Outcome

The redesign transformed Create Route from a dense collection of mapping tools into a more focused, contextual experience across desktop and mobile.

By simplifying controls, introducing smarter defaults, and removing unnecessary functionality, we reduced the complexity of route creation while preserving the flexibility experienced runners expected from one of MapMyRun’s most established features.

Create Route remained one of MapMyRun’s most heavily used web experiences, with thousands of runners visiting the tool each day to plan their next run.