How NaviRider built a custom map and navigation experience
By: Chelsea Goddard
The fastest route isn’t always what bikers need. Criteria like curviness, road quality, scenery, and elevation gain, can be more important than time and distance. NaviRider is a mobile navigation app tailored specifically to motorcycle riders.
With NaviRider everything is combined in one app — route search, POI search, social interactions, and turn-by-turn directions. Bikers can discover and evaluate new routes, track and share their own directions, follow the live GPS positions of friends, and seamlessly transition between the app’s content and the navigation interface.
The app is built using our Maps for Mobile SDKs, and NaviRider has customized the navigation experience using our Maps for Navigation SDK. A simple, intuitive display shows riders where they’re headed, allowing them to pause the route and toggle route-recording. For many bikers, safety is a significant concern, so the app provides custom alerts like upcoming sharp turns and road hazards. With our Navigation SDK you can customize every aspect of the interface, map data, and routing experience.
For addresses and place search, NaviRider is using our Geocoding API. If you’re cruising Highway 1 in Big Sur, CA and your gas light comes on, you can search for the closest station and either navigate straight to it or add it to the route.
Our Directions APIs enable NaviRider users to incorporate multiple waypoints into their routes. These APIs are accessible through our Navigation SDK and can handle complex routing calculations including multiple stops, pick-up/drop off locations, and live-traffic informed ETAs. For NaviRider, the ability to take advantage of these features provides more control over the experience — bikers can find a route they like, search POIs, create a custom itinerary, and hit the road without leaving the app.
NaviRider used Mapbox Studio, our visual design suite, to customize the map’s data and style for an adventure feel. The map emphasizes points of interests, terrain, contour lines, and road features, carefully displaying the information at each zoom level. The camera angle and user interactions are fine-tuned for searching and navigating on the go. You can switch between the base style of your choice — satellite, terrain, outdoor — to customize the map even further.
We recently helped the NaviRider team through a challenging design issue, and Vojta Knezu, CEO, had some nice things to say about it:
The customer support at Mapbox is great. Every question has been answered, and we’ve even been helped with hard technical issues. One of the biggest challenges for us was evaluating every single road in the US and Europe and how windy it was. It was a huge computational task. Mapbox helped us through it so we could visualize all of the rated routes in Mapbox Studio. This also required a lot of data space which was generously provided by Mapbox.
Download the NaviRider app for your next motorcycle adventure. If you’re looking to build a custom navigation experience on mobile, check out our Maps for Navigation SDK and Maps for Mobile SDKs. Have questions? Reach out to sales or hit us up on twitter, @mapbox.
Turn-by-turn navigation for motorcycles was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.