Wayfinding is about solving the spatial and directional problems. It essentially pertains to huge public constructions like museums, hospitals, airports, department offices, parks, and cultural centers. This could also be relevant to tourist spots and travel routes that are not easy to make a way through.
To that reference, a wayfinding solution helps people to find their way to a certain location or some destination point. A good wayfinding system allows the user to locate spots and routes accurately and slays a lot of effort and chaos and help to make services and resources within the environment more manageable and value-defining, as they can be accessed and interfaced by users easily.
As it seems clear, setting up signages take effort and involves high cost of design and planning. It is only possible to implement if you have a certain budget and enough resources set aside for such ideas.
Also, signs and kiosks require a lot of spaces and should be placed tactically in the right place to offer the best visual results.
If a place receives multi-lingual visitors it gets even tough for makers to cater to different people from different language backgrounds.
It is not just expensive to build the physical wayfinding infrastructure but it also takes a lot of expenses to maintain it.
There is no live interaction or dynamic interfacing involved in printed or etched signage. Which further makes it restricted in terms of communication and user interaction.
Wayfinding mobile apps allow users to get highly accurate and interactive ways to find directions and locate places.
These apps allow users to guide them throughout in real-time with the help of GPS and geo-tagging functionality.
It also provides you live photos of the places and landmarks to help you with easy navigation.
The apps come with mobility-driven features and interpersonal resources like voice alerts and auto-suggestions, making it highly easy and interactive for you to find and reach places.
With wayfinding, mobile apps users are able to even save recent and frequent map readings and bookmark important landmarks to refer in future. The app can be programmed to allow them to leave their comments and suggestions to help other users and the provider with some important feedback. This could prove highly helpful in upgrading and optimizing app features and resources to make it best serve the purpose, which would further enhance and augment the range and utility of wayfinding.
1. You reach a building’s parking lot. The mobile app would connect you with the wayfinding system and you would enter the geofenced area. Here, the system sends you a custom message which may greet you to the destination and ask you to swipe and proceed for further instructions.
2. As you reach a lobby area or a passageway of the building you get the directions to guide your way forward. Here you get help in finding directions through voice assistance and 3D map guidance.
3. If you get to wait outside a chamber for your turn, after a certain time a beacon will trigger a text saying something like this “Sorry for the long wait today! Here’s a 25% discount coupon for our coffee shop!” This adds to user engagement.
4. As you are done with your appointment or have consumed your service, you might get a promotional message from the provider to avail the certain offer, aiming at the user retention.
5. While you leave the premises, beacon sends a ‘thank you for visiting’ or a ‘goodbye’ message. This might be followed by a request for a short survey or experience ratings.
Go for Beacons – Low-energy Bluetooth beacons can be employed to build custom turn-by-turn mobile apps. Beacons can be implemented at a low cost and without any coding efforts. It can support features like tracking time, sending push messages and automate check-ins.
Implement Geo-fencing – This GPS-based macro-location technology can locate users in a large geographical range and effectively cover the purpose of serving them at public properties, parking lots and large shopping bays.
Try Blue Dot Innovation – Blue Dot allows you to implement context-aware navigation in the wayfinding app. This technology covers a lot of intelligence-driven facets and helps you serve your users with great relevance and accuracy, offering them personalized results.
While you plan to build your application, you must focus on the pain points of your users/visitors and look into how to get rid of them with the right wayfinding approach. This could be achieved by determining streamlined wayfinding roles and following committed practices that provide a strong base structure and functional value to the solution. These are the preliminary practices to be followed:
Use Consistent Nomenclature
If you own a hospital for instance, what name do you use for the section where you operate patients. Is it called operation theatre or surgery lab? Here you have to be very clear about the names you use to refer to different sections and resources of the facility. This would help you to be consistent with your referencing resources and signage patterns and help you get the app framed and designed authentically.
Remember Special Requirements
The app should cater to apt people and consider diverse situations to be a successful app. It should be catering to the needs of the elderly and people with special needs and should have a route plan and support system to help them navigate and access destinations easily and effortlessly.
Incorporate Facility Hours
Do you allow users to use your facility and its services all the time or it is restricted to certain hours of the day? And are you just allowing them to enter through a certain entry point? You have to program your app to address and support such factors and make your system respond to such situations and also responsively handle indeterminate conditions that might possibly appear.
Create Context-Aware Content
Allow your users with personalized solutions as per their needs by offering them content referring to and serving their preferences and requirements. This can be done by tracking their on-app activities and asking for contextually important and relevant details from them.
As you plan to build a cost-effective customized mobile wayfinding app for your facility or expanse, you should go with the practices and resources that are proven, authentic and compliant to serve such solutions. Which brings in the need to go with mobile app developer having already served such solutions and of course the technology and tools that dedicatedly serve the purpose of building cost-optimized solutions with their evolved references and offerings.
By practically analyzing specific business needs and accordingly drawing its route and signage plan, your developer would build a source base for your wayfinding app.
The initial contributory mapping follows the base structure plan to be implemented into the wireframe chart. Thereafter, beacons and geofences are deployed around the mapped structure. The route plan along with different location points is appointed and implemented with tracking and navigation features to allow users with dynamic real-time information and instructions. These features are allied with supporting functionalities like time-tracking, context-aware updates, routing alerts, push messages, custom announcements and more.
All these functional resources and components are eventfully processed into different service utilities and modules to help users with different wayfinding purposes. And all this is collectively sourced and supported by the Beacons, Blue Dot, and Geo-fencing and allied technologies to help you get the approval and benefits of the applied technology in the space of wayfinding.
Also, as these technologies best interpret the array of location tracking and navigation through their all-pervasive approach, they fit into different parameters and traits, allowing you to design minimalist user-first apps attained cost-effectively.
Be it any realm or domain – hospital, hotel or public department – with resourcefully approach wayfinding resources you can build substantial design interfaces that work with modern users and contribute to advanced value dynamics in a technologically-driven wayfinding system.
When built and applied resourcefully, wayfinding mobile app can help you maximize returns and enhance your brand image while allowing you to improve your bottom line. With the help of well-thought-out implementation and systematized efforts, you can drive user adoption and this can prove highly impactful to generate better ROIs.
Here are the top app promotion strategies you can implement:
1. The first thing you should do here is to make your app relevant to user needs and make it provide a solution addressing their pain points. Also, it should be easy to use and refer to and should dynamically communicate with them on-the-move.
2. Visible signs and QR codes are a must. Implementing these in your solution makes it sure that the user does not miss any direction and finds appointment right on time and is not taken over for their turn by others.
3. Email is a great way to advertise your wayfinding app with the targeted users. You cannot just promote your app through emailers and newsletters but also update and engage your existing users and encourage them to be a part of the endeavor.
4. Social platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become go-to places to reach out to the crowd and increase your visibility and recall value as a brand. These are increasingly proving to be great tools to attract, connect and retain users.
5. You can also go with paid promotions and cross advertising to build your user base. Here, you can promote your app through Google Ads or tying up with different affiliate channels, PR agencies, and media players to help you circulate your word and augment your reach.
6. Creating a search-optimized landing page on your blog or partnering with different sites who have similar audience base as yours can also be beneficial. You can enhance these efforts further by allowing referral bonus or participation rewards.
At Konstant Infosolutions we can offer you consulting over wayfinding app development for your specific business requirements. Our expert mobile app developers can help you with customized all-encompassing wayfinding app with all leading features and modules to serve your users well and all that keeping your budget constraints in mind.
To know more about our services email us at [email protected]
Manish Jain is the co-founder and Managing Director at Konstant Infosolutions. He is responsible for the overall operations of the company and has played a major role in bringing Konstant up from its humble beginnings and, with his immense energy and drive, transforming it into a globally trusted name in IT solutions.
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