Digital wayfinding: what it is and what it costs

Digital wayfinding is what you buy when printed signs stop keeping up with the building. The pitch is always the same, and it is a good one: change the content instead of the sign.

What varies enormously is how that content reaches the visitor, and that choice drives everything else. It sets the bill, it decides who has to maintain the thing, and it decides whether anyone actually uses it.

What is digital wayfinding?

Digital wayfinding is any system where the navigation content lives in software rather than in ink, so it can be updated without making a new physical object.

That is the whole definition, and it is broader than most vendors let on. A touchscreen in a lobby is digital wayfinding. So is a map that opens on a visitor's phone. So is a screen by the lift cycling through today's meetings. They share a property and almost nothing else.

It is worth separating from two neighbours it gets confused with. Digital signage is about broadcasting content, usually marketing, and wayfinding is one thing it can carry. Indoor positioning is about knowing where a person is standing, which is a harder and much more expensive problem that most buildings do not need solved.

The four delivery formats

Every product in this category is one of these four, or a bundle of them sold as a platform.

• Touchscreen kiosks. A screen on a stand at a fixed point. Good at first impressions and at serving people who arrive at one main entrance. Useless twenty metres away, which is where most people get lost.
• A map on the visitor's phone, reached by scanning a code. The code identifies the spot, so the map opens knowing where the reader is standing. Costs almost nothing to place and can go anywhere you can stick a sticker.
• A native app with live positioning. The blue dot that follows someone down a corridor. Genuinely useful in airports and large hospitals, and it needs beacons or similar hardware plus an app install at the front door.
• Digital display boards. A screen showing a directory or today's room bookings. Really digital signage doing a wayfinding signage job, and it inherits digital signage's running costs.

What each format costs to run

Purchase price is the easy number to compare and the least useful one. The figures below are broad United States planning ranges for a mid-sized building, and the last column is the one that decides whether the system still works in three years.

Who updates it, and how often that goes wrong

This is the question that predicts whether a digital wayfinding project succeeds, and it is almost never the question that gets asked during procurement.

A digital system inherits a maintenance job that a printed sign never had. Someone has to know the content management system, have a login that still works, and hear about the department move in time to act on it. In practice that person is often one facilities manager who learned the CMS once, and the system starts drifting the month they change role.

The failure mode is worse than a stale printed sign, because a screen looks authoritative. Nobody assumes a glowing display is out of date. A building that spent forty thousand pounds on kiosks showing a layout from two reorganisations ago has bought the worst of both worlds.

So the real question is not which system has the best features. It is how many people in your organisation could correct a room name in the next ten minutes. If the honest answer is one, choose the format with the lowest editing friction.

How to choose a format for your building

Three questions get you most of the way, and none of them is about the software.

• Where do people actually get lost? If it is at the front door, a kiosk helps. If it is at the third junction on the second floor, a kiosk in the lobby will never reach them.
• How often does the building change? Under once a year, printed signage is still the cheapest correct answer. Monthly, you need something you can edit yourself.
• Will visitors install anything? If they are already in your app to book or check in, positioning is worth considering. If they are a stranger who is late, anything requiring an install will not be used.

Making a start on one floor

You do not have to pick a platform for the whole estate to find out whether this helps.

QRCodeMaps is the second format on that list. You upload the floor plan you already have, place a marker on each room and facility, and print the codes into the signage that is already on the wall. Someone scans one and sees the plan with their position marked, then searches for where they are going. No app, because it opens in the browser. No hardware, because the code is ink.

It also answers the maintenance question in the right direction. Editing a marker takes a minute and needs no training, so the number of people who can keep it current is however many accounts you hand out.

Do one floor, print the codes, and look at what people search for in the first fortnight. That search log tells you more about your building than a procurement exercise will. Plans start from $99 a month and there is a free trial.