Interactive floor plans

Most buildings already have a floor plan. It sits in a PDF somewhere, or laminated on a wall by the fire exit, and nobody has looked at it in years.

An interactive floor plan is the same drawing with one difference: the things on it are data rather than ink. Rooms have names you can search, points can carry a photo and opening hours, and changing something takes a click instead of a reprint.

What interactive floor plan software does

The category name covers two quite different products, and buying the wrong one is the usual mistake.

The first kind is for designing buildings. You draw walls, place furniture and produce a plan. That is the market that terms like “floor plan creator” mostly serve, and it is aimed at architects, estate agents and people planning a kitchen.

The second kind is for operating buildings. The plan already exists and the job is to make it useful: name the rooms, make them searchable, let people find things, and keep it current as the building changes. That is what facilities, operations and front of house teams actually need, and it is what this page is about.

What makes a plan interactive

Four capabilities separate an interactive plan from a picture of one.

• Named, searchable points. Every room, desk and facility is an object with a name, so someone can type “radiology” or “meeting room 4B” and get an answer.
• Detail behind each point. A description, a photo, opening hours, a contact. The things people would otherwise ring reception to ask.
• Links between floors and buildings. Without them a plan is a single sheet, and most real questions cross a staircase.
• Editing without redrawing. If a room rename means going back to a designer, the plan will be out of date within a year.

How to turn a static plan into an interactive one

You do not need to start from CAD, and for most buildings you should not.

Find the best plan you already have. A fire evacuation plan is usually the most current drawing in any building, because it has to be. An architectural drawing, a lettings floor plate or a facilities layout all work too. Export it as an image.

Upload it, then click to place a marker on each room and facility and give it the name people actually use. This is the step that decides whether the plan is useful: if the booking system says Meeting Room 3 and the door says Boardroom, pick one and fix the other.

Then add the facilities everyone forgets. Toilets, lifts, stairs, exits, water points and first aid generate more searches than any meeting room, and they are almost always missing from the first pass.

Putting the plan where people need it

An interactive plan on your intranet helps the people who already know to look there. It does nothing for the visitor standing in a corridor wondering which way to turn.

That is the gap QRCodeMaps is built for. Each marker on your plan can produce a printable code. Put that code on the sign, the door plate or the lift lobby, and someone who scans it opens the plan with their own position already pinned. From there they search.

It runs in the phone browser, so nobody installs anything, and the printed code never expires because it points at the map rather than carrying the information itself. Rename a room and every sign in the building is correct again.

Plans start from $99 a month with a free trial, which is enough to put one floor up and see what people search for.