Digital Wayfinding: Upkeep

One of the perks of a digital wayfinding system is that it can be updated down-the-road to keep the digital situation in-sync with the real world situation. This perk also happens to be the biggest advantage of digital wayfinding over static wayfinding (fixed signs).

And one step up….

One of the perks of a great digital wayfinding system is that you can make the changes yourself, and don’t have to turn to your supplier. Its faster and cheaper.

Digital Wayfinding Systems, where you have to go to your supplier to implement any changes, often indicate that the wayfinding application is graphical-driven, which has some major downfalls, such as being very expensive and sluggish to maintain.

Example of what a graphical driven, digital wayfinding system cannot do and a data-driven system has no trouble with:

“If overnight a waterline breaks (or something), making a hallway unaccessible; can I make this adjustment in the wayfinding application and, most importantly, will this change immediately be live?”

Answer:
Yes. By (temporary) disabling this hallway all requests will not use this hallway in the route-calculation and displaying of the directions. If, for example, a number of departments are affected too, and you need to assign temporary housing in other areas of the building, or perhaps even in another building, this too can be set in the wayfinding system and the directions automatically adjust.

This is an ad-hoc situation, that cannot be foreseen. Another example is when an elevator stops working or painters work on a stairwell and you didn’t get the memo in time.

Planned Re-Routing

Situations that can be foreseen and where the detours can be triggered by the wayfinding admin for immediate display:

Lets take a University as an example: Move-in Day, Parent-Teacher Days, Emergency Snow-Routes, Emergency Evac Situations, Sport Events, etc.

Every days changes

And then of course we have the ongoing changes that don’t make life easier for the wayfinding experience of the visitor, like departments move, classes re-locate, teachers get sick, physicians get replaced, normal maintenance work on the structure and hallways, etc.

They all cause in one way or another for the flow to take a detour. Updating the digital wayfinding system in real-time takes a lot of hassle away.

Only a digital, data-driven wayfinding system, offers enough flexibility to adjust to the real-life situation immediately. Impossible to do for a graphical-driven wayfinding system.

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