Mobile App Prototype
Find Hanami
Find Hanami is a mobile-first app designed to help tourists and locals in Japan discover seasonal flower blooms — what's blooming now, where to find it, and when to go. Japan's natural beauty is deeply seasonal, but bloom information is often fragmented across local tourism sites, blogs, and social media. Find Hanami centralizes this into a simple, location-based experience that makes seasonal exploration effortless.
Goals
Design a lightweight, intuitive app that:
- Shows current and upcoming blooms
- Highlights where to see them
- Works quickly on-the-go
- Requires no account or onboarding friction
Pain Points
Travelers in Japan often struggle to:
- Know which flowers are currently blooming
- Find reliable, location-specific bloom spots
- Plan visits around short bloom windows
- Avoid information overload from scattered sources
Target Users
- Tourists visiting Japan
- First-time visitors unfamiliar with regional bloom cycles
- Casual travelers who want quick, visual answers
- Photography and nature enthusiasts
Design Principles
- Season-first: Time and nature drive the experience
- Low friction: No login, no setup, no learning curve
- Clarity over depth: Useful info, not encyclopedic content
- Mobile priority: Designed for outdoor, one-handed use
Decisions & Trade-offs
- Feed and map, not map-first. A map with no context on first load forces users to guess where to zoom. Leading with a curated bloom feed gives an answer immediately, and the map becomes a tool once someone has a location in mind, rather than the entry point.
- No accounts, no saved trips. This cuts real functionality: no personalization, no save-for-later, in exchange for zero friction on a trip most users take once. For something measured in days, not habitual use, low friction outweighed personalization.
- Bloom Alerts stayed a concept rather than a built feature. Notifications need permissions and ongoing backend support that didn't fit inside a three-week solo build, so it's documented as a scoped-out feature, not an oversight.
Seasonal Bloom Feed
- Monthly bloom highlights
- Flower-focused discovery instead of event-based listings
Location-Based Discovery
- Curated bloom locations across Japan
- Easy scanning by region and flower type
Bloom Alerts (Concept)
- Notify users when blooms reach peak season
- Designed as opt-in and non-intrusive
Map View
- Visual exploration of bloom spots
- Ideal for trip planning and spontaneous exploration
Challenges
- Balancing simplicity with usefulness
- Designing for users unfamiliar with Japanese geography
- Creating value without personalization or accounts
- Working within Base44's constraints while maintaining polish
- Manually adding images to the database because AI can't source them
Outcome
- Shipped as a working, clickable prototype rather than static screens, live at the link above
- Identified a focused travel problem and scoped an MVP with restraint
- Made intentional product decisions, including what to leave out
- Built and designed in the same pass, rather than handing off finished screens
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