YaVoy connects neighbours travelling between villages in rural Spain.
No payments, no in-app chat, no friction borrowed from urban rideshare apps.
Just the parts that actually fit a community of 400 people who already know each other.
Web: yavoy.info
The idea started as a BlaBlaCar made more immediate. Spontaneous enough to be used the same day, with less planning and less friction. Closer to texting a neighbour than to booking a trip.
But the pieces that make BlaBlaCar work for strangers (payments, in-app chat, ratings, verified identity) are the same pieces that add weight. And weight was what we were trying to remove.
In a village of 400 people, the opposite works. Trust is inherited, not rated. Payment is three euros for petrol passed by hand. And the natural channel for conversation isn’t an in-app chat, it’s WhatsApp.
A mobile-first web app that helps users:
YaVoy is designed for everyday users in rural communities, where simplicity, clarity and trust matter more than features.
The user flow was kept intentionally short. The goal wasn’t to add more, it was to make each step feel obvious. The app needed to answer three questions fast: Where do I want to go? When? Who’s driving?
The decisions below are where the design actually lives.
Editing over adding. The default in product design is to add: more features, more states, more flows. For a pilot in a rural community with low digital infrastructure, the higher-leverage move is the opposite. Every removal here was a deliberate product call, not a limitation.
Honest defaults. Two afternoons sitting with real users in Espinosa and Medina de Pomar shifted the work from solving abstract problems to solving the ones in front of me. Trust verified by being a neighbour. Coordination handled with a tool people already master. Designing with the existing culture, not against it.
The product as a tool, not a destination. YaVoy works when people barely think about it, when the app disappears behind the conversation it helps start. That meant resisting every pattern designed to keep users inside the app: notifications, engagement loops, gamified profiles. The metric is rides shared, not minutes in app.
Scope as strategy. Leaving out payments and chat isn’t temporary. It’s the product. It keeps YaVoy maintainable by a small team, trustworthy for a non-tech-native audience, and recognisable as something different from the urban apps people already mistrust.
A working app concept that supports real mobility needs in rural Spain without borrowing the complexity of urban rideshare. Three screens, one clear flow, and a deliberate handoff to WhatsApp at the moment the conversation matters.
The most important design decision was restraint.