Indoor wayfinding: help visitors find the room, not just the building
Google Maps gets people to your entrance. From there they are on their own, in a building that was extended twice and signposted once. Indoor wayfinding closes that last part of the journey, with maps, with signage, and where it is needed with a live position: our own beacons in the building and our navigation SDK inside your app, so the visitor sees where they are and where to turn. Since 2011 we help teams work out which of the three their building actually needs, and we will still say when the cheapest fix is better signs rather than an app.
Wayfinding is a maps and content project as much as a technology project. That is the part most budgets underestimate.
What getting lost costs you
Nobody buys indoor navigation because it is interesting. They buy it because the same five problems keep showing up in complaints, in missed appointments and in staff time. These are the ones we hear most.
Visitors arrive late, or not at all
A patient parks in the wrong parking lot, enters through the wrong door and reaches the clinic after the appointment slot has passed. The appointment is lost, the schedule slips and the person who was already anxious is now also angry. In airports the same confusion turns into a missed connection.
Your staff are the navigation system
Reception, nurses, security and cleaners spend a real part of the day pointing down corridors. It is never measured because it is nobody's job, and it grows every time the building changes.
The building changed, the signs did not
Departments move, wings are renumbered, a corridor becomes a construction barrier. Printed signage lags by months or years, and one out of date sign destroys trust in all the others.
The journey starts outside and breaks at the door
People need to know which entrance, which parking lot, which elevator and which floor, as one continuous journey. Outdoor maps stop at the facade, indoor maps start at the lobby and the join is exactly where visitors get lost.
Accessible routes are unknown
A route that works for a walking adult may be useless with a wheelchair, a bed, a stroller or heavy luggage. If the accessible route exists but is not documented, in practice it does not exist.
Three questions to answer before you buy anything
Wayfinding projects fail quietly, and they usually fail on one of these three points rather than on the technology. Answer them before you look at any product.
01. Is your problem the map, or the signs?
Walk your building as a first time visitor and mark every point where you had to make a decision without enough information. If most failures happen at those decision points, better physical signage will fix more of the problem, for less money, than any app. Digital wayfinding works best on top of decent signage, not instead of it.
02. Where will the navigation live?
A live blue dot runs inside an app, through our SDK. That works when your visitors already have your app, which is true for a daily commuter through the same airport and for your own staff, and false for someone attending one hospital appointment. If your audience is mostly first time visitors, the realistic channels are a browser page on their own phone, a QR code at a decision point, a kiosk, or a link inside the appointment message they already received. We can build the live navigation. What we cannot do is make people install an app for a single visit, so plan for the channel your visitors will actually use.
03. Who owns the map next year?
A floor plan is a snapshot of a building that keeps moving. Someone has to update rooms, names, closures and routes, with the authority to get the information from facilities. If you cannot name that person and that budget line today, the system will be wrong within a year and blamed for it.
Why GPS does not work indoors, and what does
Satellite positioning needs a clear view of the sky. Roofs, concrete and steel block or reflect those signals, so indoors a phone either loses the fix or reports a position that drifts between rooms. GPS also has almost nothing to say about which floor you are on, which is the one thing a visitor in a multi-story hospital needs. That is why searches for indoor GPS end up here: the phrase describes a need, not an available technology. Indoors, the position has to come from something inside the building, or the journey has to be designed so that it does not need a live position at all.
Option 1. Maps and QR codes, with no live positioning
Static digital maps, plus a QR code at each decision point that opens the map already centered on where the visitor is standing. There is no positioning infrastructure to install and nothing to maintain except the map itself. For many buildings this answers most of the problem at the lowest cost, and it is where we would start.
Option 2. Our beacons and our SDK, for a live blue dot
We install our own BLE beacons in the building and integrate our navigation SDK into your app. The phone listens to the beacons, works out where it is and draws the route, so the visitor gets a live position and turn by turn guidance indoors, floor by floor. Corridor and room level is the accuracy wayfinding needs: nobody has to be guided to the centimeter, and what your visitors actually experience in your building is measured during the pilot rather than promised in advance.
Two different jobs, worth keeping apart
Our Bluetooth Beacon Tracker locates tagged items on behalf of the building: it tells your team where a wheelchair or an infusion pump is, with 1 to 3 meters in 90 percent of cases, updating in the order of seconds, across up to 30 levels from -10 to +20 plus the ground floor. The navigation SDK does the opposite: it works out where the visitor's own phone is, on the phone itself, for the visitor. Same building, two systems, and buyers often ask for one while describing the other.
Option 3. Long-range positioning for very large sites
On a campus or a multi-building site, our partner Wheere offers an alternative to installing indoor devices everywhere. According to Wheere, low-frequency radio between 148 and 174 MHz allows about four gateways to cover up to roughly one square kilometer, penetrating concrete, with sub-meter accuracy and no limit on the number of devices. Those numbers are Wheere's own and we validate them on site.
The part that is not technology
Floor plans converted into usable digital maps, every room named the way visitors name it rather than the way facilities codes it, routes drawn including elevators and accessible alternatives, text in the languages your visitors speak, and a process for keeping all of it current. In most projects this is the larger half of the work, and it is the half that decides whether the system is still true in a year. Who produces the maps, in what format and who updates them after handover is defined in the site assessment, with your facilities team in the room.
How the map reaches the visitor
A live position needs the SDK, and the SDK needs an app, so the navigation goes inside an app your organization already publishes, integrated by your app team together with ours. Where there is no app, or where visitors will not install one, the same maps still reach people without a live position: a browser page opened from a QR code, a kiosk at the entrance, a screen at a junction, a link sent with the appointment. Most sites end up using both, and which combination fits your visitors is one of the outputs of the assessment.
Navigation without tracking your visitors
Wayfinding is the one people-related use case that can be built with almost no personal data, and that is worth saying out loud, because visitors assume the opposite as soon as they see the word tracking.
Guiding someone is not the same as locating them
With our SDK the position is computed on the visitor's device: the phone listens to beacons that only transmit, and the beacons receive nothing back. The building does not need to collect, store or link that position to a person. Guidance happens on the visitor's phone, and nothing about the individual needs to reach your servers.
Say what you do not collect
If your wayfinding does not store routes, does not create visitor profiles and does not require a login, put that in plain language on the first screen. It costs nothing, it removes the main reason people abandon these tools, and it is a genuine selling point over systems that harvest visitor movement.
Aggregate flow data is a separate decision
Analyzing how visitors move through the building is a legitimate and useful project. It is also a different purpose, with its own lawful basis, notice and retention period. Do not let it arrive as a hidden feature of a navigation tool: treat it as a separate decision, documented separately, and have your DPO review it.
What indoor wayfinding does not solve
We would rather lose this project than sell it into a building where it will not be used. Four honest cases, and the first one costs us work.
It does not fix bad signage, and signage is often cheaper
If people take a wrong turn at a handful of specific junctions, a handful of good signs will beat a digital system, will work for visitors without a phone and will cost a fraction of the price. In a museum, a clear floor plan at the entrance and room names that match what is written on the walls often beat an app nobody downloads. We will tell you when that is what the walkthrough shows. Digital wayfinding earns its cost in buildings that are genuinely complex, that change often, or where the journey has to start before the visitor arrives.
It does not maintain itself
The map is only as good as its last update. A wayfinding system without an owner and an update process becomes a liability: visitors follow it to a department that moved, and after that they trust neither the app nor your signs.
It does not reach everyone
Download rates for single-visit buildings are the graveyard of this category: we can put navigation in your app, and we still cannot make a first time visitor install it in a parking lot with poor signal. And even with the right channel, some people will never use it: elderly visitors, people in distress, anyone with their hands full, anyone whose battery just died. A digital layer reduces the number of people who need to ask. It never gets that number to zero, so keep the signs and keep a human at the point where people give up.
It is not an asset or people locating system
Wayfinding guides a person to a place. It does not tell you where your equipment is, and it is not designed to tell you where a member of staff is. Those are different systems with different infrastructure, and our indoor asset tracking page covers the first of them.
What it costs
Our minimum commitment is USD 5,000. There is no price list, because in wayfinding the technology is rarely the biggest number. These are the factors that decide it.
How many floors and buildings, and what state the plans are in
Cost follows the number of levels and buildings to map, and the quality of what you can give us. Current CAD or BIM files are a good starting point. A scanned PDF from an old refurbishment, with rooms that have since been renumbered, is a different project.
Whether you need a live position at all
Static maps with QR codes at decision points cost far less than any live positioning. A blue dot means beacons to install, power or batteries to plan for, and an SDK to integrate into an app. Deciding this question honestly is the single largest saving available in a wayfinding project.
Content, languages and accessibility
Room naming, route descriptions, accessible alternatives and each additional language are work per floor, repeated at every update. Airports and hospitals usually need more of this than they budget for.
Integration and delivery
Integrating our navigation SDK is joint work between your app team and ours, and it is scoped on your app, not on a price list. Linking the map to appointment letters, to your website, to kiosks or to digital signage each adds work on top. If there is no app to integrate into, that changes the shape of the project, and we would rather establish it before the pilot than during it.
Keeping it current
Budget for updates from the start, as an annual line rather than a project cost. A wayfinding system nobody updates is worse than no system.
How we work
Four steps, and the second one is the one that usually changes the brief.
Step 01. Free 30-minute discovery call
Who gets lost, where, and what it costs you when they do. We go through the three questions above and say early if this is a signage project with a small digital component rather than the other way round.
Step 02. Site assessment and a walkthrough
We walk your main visitor journeys the way a first time visitor would, from the parking lot to the destination, and mark the decision points where information is missing. This produces a list of fixes ranked by cost, and some of them need no technology at all. It is also where we agree who produces the maps, who keeps them current, and whether a live position is worth its cost here.
Step 03. Pilot on one route
One building, one entrance, one high traffic destination. Map it properly, install the beacons if the route needs a live position, integrate the SDK into your app, deliver it through the channel you chose, and measure whether people actually use it before extending to the rest of the site.
Step 04. Rollout and handover
Remaining floors and routes, integration with the systems that already talk to your visitors, and a handover that names who updates the map, how and when. Without that last part the rollout is a countdown.
Frequently asked questions
Why does GPS not work indoors?
Satellite signals need a clear line of sight to the sky. Roofs, concrete, steel and glass coatings block or reflect them, so indoors a receiver either loses the fix or reports a position that drifts by whole rooms. GPS is also poor at telling you which floor you are on, which is often the only thing a visitor needs to know. Indoors the position has to come from infrastructure inside the building, or the design has to avoid needing a live position at all.
Do you provide the navigation itself, or only the infrastructure?
Both. The beacons that go into the building are ours, and the navigation runs on our own SDK, which we integrate into your app so that your visitors see a live position and a route. The maps and the content behind that route are joint work: what you provide and what we produce is agreed during the site assessment, along with who keeps it current afterwards.
Do visitors have to download an app?
For a live blue dot, yes: the navigation runs through our SDK inside an app. That is the right answer when the people you want to guide already have your app, which is common for staff and for repeat visitors. For buildings where most people come once, we design so that it is not needed: a browser page opened from a QR code at a decision point, a link in the appointment message or a kiosk at the entrance reaches everyone who will never install anything. Many sites do both, and the choice should follow your visitors rather than the technology.
How accurate does indoor wayfinding need to be?
Less accurate than people expect. Corridor and room level is enough to guide someone, because the person does the last few meters by looking around. For reference, our BLE infrastructure locates tags to 1 to 3 meters in 90 percent of cases, comfortably inside what guidance requires, and the accuracy your visitors experience is measured in your own building during the pilot. Paying for centimeter accuracy to guide a human being is not money well spent.
Can it tell which floor someone is on?
With infrastructure inside the building, yes. Our BLE system supports up to 30 levels, from -10 to +20 plus the ground floor, with a floor plan for each level. This is precisely where satellite positioning fails, and in a hospital or an airport the floor is usually the most valuable piece of information in the whole route.
Would better signage be cheaper than a digital system?
Often, yes, and we will say so after the walkthrough even though we sell the alternative. Signage wins in buildings with a stable layout and a handful of problem junctions. Digital wayfinding wins where the building is genuinely complex, changes frequently, serves visitors in several languages, or where the journey has to begin before the visitor arrives. Many sites end up doing both, in that order.
What is the minimum budget?
USD 5,000 is our minimum commitment. Where a project lands depends mostly on the number of floors and buildings to map, the state of your floor plans, whether you need a live position or static maps are enough, how many languages you publish and what the system has to integrate with.
Specifications
Visitor-side navigation: Our BLE beacons in the building plus our navigation SDK, integrated into your app
BLE infrastructure accuracy: 1 to 3 m in 90 percent of cases
Update rate: In the order of seconds
Floors supported: Up to 30 levels from -10 to +20 plus ground floor, one floor plan per level
Ceilings: Works well up to 7 m
Node connectivity: Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz, or Ethernet on the V3 model, USB 5V power
Output: WGS 84 coordinates or metric X and Y, REST API, push callbacks
Long-range option: Wheere, partner. According to Wheere: 148 to 174 MHz, about 4 gateways for up to about 1 km2, sub-meter accuracy
Talk to an engineer, not a salesperson
Bring your floor plans and the places where people get lost most often. In 30 minutes you will know whether this is a signage problem, a maps and content problem or a positioning problem, and roughly what each would cost. If the answer is that better signs would fix it, that is what we will tell you.