WorldStamped: a travel map with digital stamps and personal memories

Challenge

WorldStamped is our own product. The countries, places, photos and notes from people's travels tend to end up scattered across different apps, galleries and notebooks, with no single overview.

We wanted one simple place where a map shows your travel history while personal data is never public by default. In a travel app that matters: places and dates say a lot about a person.

Goal: A map people fill with their own travels and memories, where everything stays private until they choose otherwise.

Solution

Users give each country or territory one of four labels: visited, lived there, in transit or want to visit, and the map colours in as they go. They then add the places they visited, with dates if they wish, and attach memories with up to five photos.

Privacy is part of the design, not a setting bolted on at the end. Profiles, visits and memories start out private. A public profile shows visited countries and countries lived in, while individual visits and memories stay private until the user publishes them. The app does not track the user's current location or publish it automatically.

For people who just want to count the countries they have visited there is a public visited countries map. You pick a country from the list or click it on the map, the count updates at once, and the list also works with a keyboard. Marks stay in the browser until you explicitly save them to a private account; saving adds only the missing countries and leaves existing visits, memories and profile privacy unchanged.

On the home page anyone can try a demo map without signing up: clicking a country stamps it, and the demo stays in the browser and is never saved. The catalogue behind the map and place search holds 205 countries, 41 territories and 224,802 places, built from the open sources Natural Earth, GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) and CLDR.