Industry
Mobility
Case Study
Sustainable Mobility Platform
Commute programs die when nobody can see who's participating. At brigit.dev I built the mobile app and backend for shared rides and live tracking. I spent a lot of time on a map that doesn't drift when you're standing at a bus stop.
Project Overview
Companies want employees to bike, carpool, or walk instead of driving alone. But email chains and spreadsheets don't make that happen. At brigit.dev I built a mobile app where people coordinate commutes, track activity, and see team impact, with a bit of friendly competition to keep it interesting.
I built the app and the backend. It's used by corporate employees, not sitting in a demo.
Mobile app that helps coworkers coordinate green commutes and see who's actually participating.
Services
- UX/UI Design
- Web Development
- Product Strategy
- Mobile Development
Key Deliverables
- Responsive Design
- Custom Development
- User Experience Improvements
Platform Type
Mobile Application
Tech Stack
- TypeScript
- React Native
- Expo
- NestJS
- PostgreSQL
- WebSocket
The Challenge
Sustainable commuting programs fail when participation is invisible. Nobody knows who's in. Nobody sees the impact. It feels like homework, not something a team does together.
Then there's the map. People expect their dot on the map to stay still when they're standing still. GPS doesn't work that way, and when the map lies, people stop trusting the whole app.
Approach
Mobile-first, that's where commuters actually are. Shared ride coordination, live activity tracking, team rankings and badges to make participation visible without being annoying about it.
I spent a lot of time on the location problem specifically. Consumer GPS gives you maybe 5 meters of accuracy. Google Maps interprets that noise as movement. Users look like they're traveling when they're standing at a bus stop. Fixing that perception was as important as building the features.
The Solution
Employees find or join shared commutes, bike groups, carpools, walking buddies, with routes, departure times, and rough CO₂ savings estimates.
During a commute, the app tracks distance and duration on a map. Teammates can see who's active. Weekly rankings and badges reward participation without turning it into a corporate cringe-fest.
Everything updates live through WebSockets so commute status doesn't feel stale.
Key Challenges
-
GPS drift making stationary users look like they're moving on the map, killed trust in live tracking until we smoothed it properly
-
smoothing location data without hiding real movement when someone actually starts riding
-
gamification that motivates people without feeling patronizing
-
battery drain, background location, and reconnecting on bad mobile networks
The Outcome
Corporate employees actually use it. Participation is visible. Teams can see their combined impact, not just individual trips in a vacuum.
The location fix was the thing I'm most glad we got right. Everything else is normal app building. The map lying to users wasn't.
Context
Built at brigit.dev. The GPS ghost-movement problem ate more time than I expected. Plugging in a maps API is easy. Making 5-meter-accuracy GPS look honest on a screen is not.
The app works because people can see each other participating. The social layer matters as much as the map.