Whether you are a first time visitor at a Museum or Event Venue or English isn’t your first language or you only have an hour to cram in all your need to do at an Exhibition, wayfinding becomes critical to whether you have a positive experience.

We recently participated in an event in Singapore, where the Attractions industry voiced there challenges to the tech community as they strive to offer a World Class Service in a competitive landscape. One of the challenges was the ability to offer a superior wayfinding service to ensure visitors to their Attraction spent more time enjoying the location and less time trying to find the toilets or a particular exhibit.

The wayfinding challenge is not revolutionary, but what is, is that there is now technology and methods to help address some of the fundamentals to ensure that this part of the visitor experience is a positive one.

No longer are visitors relying on a kiosk or the information desk to get them to their chosen destination. While they still continue to serve a purpose, visitors can now access venue content ‘on the go’ – digital maps accessed via an app or web are now a real enabler to help visitors explore and find more enjoyment out of their surrounding environment.

A typical example of where digital maps on the mobile are integral to a visitor’s experience is in the Gallery / Musuem environment where visitors, having purchased their tickets after queuing for who knows how long, realise that with limited time remaining they need to plan an efficient around the exhibition halls so they see what they want to see. Mobile indoor maps and wayfinding are critical to this and throw in indoor positioning that can locate a visitor within a meter of their location and suddenly you have a very powerful tool in helping visitors around the venue.

While indoor maps play a role, it’s also important that the overall user experience is a simple and fuss free experience, if you have to wait 5 seconds for a map to load or you can’t rotate the map to see your heading and the content is static, a visitor’s experience can turn from positive to negative one pretty quickly.

While tech innovation keeps on progressing, it’s worth remembering that as an Attraction operator, your visitors are not always ‘up’ with the tech so human interaction, physical signs and inviting staff are core fundamentals to a memorable visitor experience.

On the flipside, we all like to look ahead,  and at Point, we are currently dabbling with Augmented Reality and are pretty excited to see how that can enhance experiences even further.

Contact Andrew indoor@point-consulting.com to learn more

At a recent event in Singapore: