kevintonb.

2020

MyGuardianAngelGPS

A GPS app built for the moment you have no time to search: hospitals, fuel, hotels, bars and shops one tap away, with a direct route to the nearest trauma centre.

The home map, with one tap category filters for restaurants, hospitals and hotels.The emergency screen: a medical centre pinned on the map, with its address, phone number, rating and directions.Nearby hospitals as map pins across Chicago, listed by proximity underneath.A hotel’s detail card, with directions, its phone number and a share control.
Four screens from the app’s own site, recovered from the Internet Archive

01 · the problem

A browsing interface fails exactly when it matters most. Someone who needs the nearest hospital right now should not be composing a search, reading reviews or deciding between three results, and someone in an emergency should not be leaving the app to dial. The metric that matters is not how much the map knows; it is how many decisions sit between opening the app and getting help.

02 · what i built

Categories instead of a search box. Hospitals, gas stations, hotels, bars, restaurants, shops and restrooms are each one tap, ordered by proximity, each result arriving with directions, a phone number and a rating already attached so there is no second lookup. On top of that sits a dedicated emergency path that routes straight to the nearest trauma care centre, which is the one journey the app refuses to make anybody navigate for. There is no login and no sign-up, and the app stored no user data, which is both a privacy position and one fewer screen between a person and the thing they need.

One-tap categories
Hospitals, gas stations, hotels, bars, restaurants, shopping and restrooms, each a single tap and each ordered by how close it is, rather than a query to be typed and refined.
Emergency routing
A dedicated path to the nearest trauma care centre. The one journey in the app that is never allowed to require a decision.
Everything on the first result
Directions, phone number and rating arrive with the place itself, so acting on a result does not mean a second search somewhere else.
No account, no data kept
No login, no sign-up and nothing stored. A privacy position, and also one fewer screen standing between somebody and the help they opened the app for.

03 · what happened

The app’s own site reported more than a thousand people using it daily and over fifteen thousand searches a day, with results returned in roughly a quarter of a second to two seconds.

  • 15k+searches a day
  • 1k+daily users
  • 0.25sfastest reported search

Questions

What people ask

How is this different from a general maps app?

It removes the search. A maps app is built for a person who is browsing; this is built for a person who already knows what they need and has no time to describe it. Categories replace the query, proximity replaces ranking, and the emergency path replaces the whole journey.

What was the emergency feature?

A direct route to the nearest trauma care centre, reachable without composing a search or leaving the app to dial. It was the reason the rest of the interface was kept as plain as it is.

Where did these screenshots come from?

The app’s own website, recovered from a 2022 capture in the Internet Archive. The domain has since lapsed and both store listings are gone, so these four screens are the only surviving record of what the product looked like.