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Introducing the Scan Heatmap: See Where Visitors Actually Go

Your scan logs have hundreds, maybe thousands of rows. Every scan, every search, every zero-result query — all neatly recorded. All very hard to read. Today we are shipping the scan heatmap, a new analytics view that paints your scan data directly onto your floor plan. Blue blobs show where people scan. Green blobs show where they search successfully. Red blobs show where they search and get nothing. Patterns that disappear in a table become impossible to miss on a map.

Why scan logs are hard to read

A scan log is a list of events. Each row says "at time T, someone scanned marker M, and here is their device info." Good for audits. Bad for understanding visitor behavior.

MIT Senseable City Lab research on foot-traffic analytics has a well-cited finding: spatial visualizations reveal patterns in 80-90% of buildings where tabular logs would show noise. The reason is that navigation is a spatial phenomenon — people move through space, not through rows. Looking at your building's scan data as a table is like reading a novel one word per page.

A heatmap flips this. The same scan data becomes a picture of where visitors actually go, how they cluster, where they hesitate, and where your wayfinding is blank.

What the heatmap shows (three layers)

Open Analytics → Heatmap and pick a map. You will see your floor plan rendered with three overlays you can toggle on or off.

Blue — scans. Every QR code scan from the last 30 days, placed at the scanned marker's position. Darker and larger blobs mean more scans. This is your visitor-entry pattern.

Green — successful searches. Every search that returned results, placed at the marker the searcher was near. This is what visitors ask for and find.

Red — zero-result searches. Searches that returned nothing, placed at the searcher's location. This is your opportunity map: visitors are looking for something you do not have marked.

You can show all three at once or just one. The overlay uses multiply blend mode so the floor plan stays legible — you can still see corridors and room numbers through the data.

Reading your first heatmap

The first time you open the heatmap, you will probably see two things: one or two very dark blue blobs and a lot of near-empty space. The dark blobs are your highest-traffic scan points — usually the main entrance and the most-trafficked floor. The empty space is where you have either no QR codes or very low-traffic ones.

Before reacting, compare the pattern to what you expected. A hospital's main lobby should light up in blue. A hotel's pool should light up in the evening hours. A warehouse's receiving dock should light up in the morning. If the pattern matches expectations, your wayfinding is reaching the right places. If it does not — the entrance is quiet, some forgotten corner is bright — that is your first insight.

Then turn on the green (successful search) layer. Green clusters in the same spots as blue are healthy: visitors scan, find what they need, move on. Green clusters far from blue are interesting — they mean visitors are looking in places where they cannot easily scan.

Finally turn on red. Red anywhere is actionable. Red near a high-scan area is urgent.

Example: a shopping mall's dead zone

A two-level mall used the heatmap to audit their wayfinding after a quiet quarter. Blue and green lit up on the first floor around the food court and the east-wing anchor. The second floor was nearly empty.

The ops team's initial theory was that the second floor was just low-traffic. But the heatmap also showed a red cluster at the top of the west-wing escalator — searches for "restroom" and "ATM" that returned nothing. When they walked the space, they found the second-floor restroom was well-hidden behind a service corridor, with no signage and no QR marker. It had been a dead zone for years, but the only evidence was visitors quietly suffering.

They added a restroom marker, an ATM marker, and a QR code at the top of the escalator. Two weeks later, the heatmap showed the zone lighting up blue and green — the wayfinding had reached where visitors were.

Example: a hospital's confusion cluster

A hospital noticed the heatmap for Floor 3 had an unexpected blue cluster near a service elevator that was not supposed to be public-facing. Many duplicate scans. No searches, no navigation outward.

Investigation revealed the service elevator looked almost identical to the patient elevator from the lobby view, and visitors were mistakenly taking it to Floor 3 — where they got confused and scanned the nearest QR code (on the service elevator door) over and over.

The fix was a single wayfinding sign at the lobby level directing visitors to the correct elevator bank, plus a new marker on the service elevator door labeled "Staff only — please use patient elevators" with a transition pointing back to the lobby map. The blue cluster faded within a week.

Example: an airport's search gap

An airport's wayfinding team uses the heatmap weekly. One week they noticed red blobs appearing at the international arrivals gate — searches for "baggage claim" that returned nothing. The airport had a baggage claim marker, but under a different name: "BC-3A." International travelers, many of them searching in English as a second language, did not know what BC-3A meant.

They renamed the marker to "Baggage claim (International)" and added an alias in the description. The red blobs turned green within three days.

Airports Council International research on passenger flow suggests that a 10-15% reduction in navigation hesitation translates to measurable improvements in gate-to-gate times and passenger satisfaction — and the fix here was a one-line text edit.

Pair with zero-result searches

The heatmap and the zero-result search list on the Engagement dashboard work best together. The heatmap tells you where the red is. The zero-result list tells you what the red is. Combined, you get a location + query pair that is almost always one edit away from a fix.

A workflow that works well: once a week, open the zero-result list, pick the top five queries, open the heatmap, and check where each query was searched. If the location is near an existing marker, rename or add an alias. If it is far from any marker, add a marker. Iterate. Most wayfinding systems reach a "good" state within 4-6 weekly cycles; reaching "great" is just maintenance after that.

Tips for acting on heatmap data

A few patterns from teams that use heatmaps well:

Compare this month to last month. The heatmap defaults to the last 30 days. The real value is in the trend — is that red cluster growing or shrinking? Did yesterday's fix actually change tomorrow's map?

Look at the absence, not just the presence. Where is the blue missing that should be there? A quiet reception desk might mean it is well-signposted and nobody needs to scan — or it might mean nobody knows the QR is there.

Do not over-optimize for dark-blue clusters. Very high scan counts usually mean confusion or a popular destination. Both are signals, but "confusion" deserves fixes, not celebrations.

The scan heatmap is available on the Scale plan. The existing Traffic, Engagement, and Audience dashboards remain on Professional. Free trial available.