Most wayfinding builds start by trying to work out where the visitor is. That work is already done. An NFC tap needs the phone within a couple of centimetres of the Marker, and a QR scan needs line of sight. Either way, the person holding that phone is standing at that Marker. Everything in this recipe follows from taking that seriously.
What a tap does
A phone touches the Marker
Or the camera reads its QR code. No app, no account, nothing to install.
The Marker's own address opens
/m/{marker}?src=nfc
This never changes. It is printed into the chip and the code at the factory.
NearField looks up what it points at
This is the part you control, and the part you can change at any time.
Your Experience renders
/view/{experience}
Counted as a visit, with the tap or scan recorded against that Marker.
One Experience per place
The rule that makes wayfinding easy is the rule that makes everything else easy: one Marker, one Experience, one place. A shared Experience behind six Markers cannot tell anybody where they are, because it does not know.
- Name each Experience after its place: Fourth floor lift lobby, not Wayfinding 4. That name is what you will read in Stats and what a passport list will show.
- Group them into a Project for the building or the floor, so their numbers roll up together.
- Keep the same blocks in the same order on every one. A visitor who learns the shape of the page at the first Marker has learned it for the whole building.
The floor-plan image, one per Marker
This is the technique that carried over from the legacy platform unchanged, because nothing has beaten it. There is no live indoor positioning involved at all. You make the plan once and export one copy per Marker with the dot moved.
- 1
Draw one simplified plan
Strip out structural detail. Keep room shapes, doorways, stairs, lifts, toilets and the exits. A plan a visitor can read in three seconds beats an accurate one.
- 2
Export one copy per Marker
Same plan, same crop, same scale, with the you are here dot moved to that Marker's position. Nine Markers means nine exports and about an hour of work, once.
- 3
Add an Image block to each Experience
Upload that Marker's export. Put it in the same position on every page, usually directly under the heading.
- 4
Write alt text that gives the route in words
Second floor plan. You are at the lift lobby; the Coral Gallery is straight ahead past the stairs, and toilets are behind you on the left. This is the version a blind visitor gets, and it is also the version that read-aloud can use.
- 5
Switch on Show alt text as caption
It puts that description on the page as visible text. Read-aloud narrates what is rendered on screen and cannot reach into an image, so this checkbox is what makes the map audible.
Map, Directions, or neither
| Block | What it does | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Map (free) | Embeds a Google Map from an address or an embed URL, in the page. The visitor can pan and zoom it. | Showing where a place is. An outdoor site, a car park, a second building. |
| Directions (free Action) | Hands the destination to the maps app the visitor already uses: Apple Maps on iPhone, Google Maps on Android. | Getting somebody to you from outside, or between two addresses. |
| Neither | An Image of the floor plan with the dot on it. | Anywhere indoors. A map of a building is worse at answering which way now than a picture of the building. |
Where GPS does not work
Geo Check-In (Growth) asks the browser for the visitor's location and compares it with a point and a radius you set: 100 metres by default, and settable in feet. Outdoors that is dependable. Indoors, under a roof, in a basement gallery or a concrete stairwell, it is not: the visitor gets You're not close enough yet or Location request timed out. Please try again. while standing in the room you named.
- Outdoors, keep the radius at 50 metres or more. A tight radius fails honest visitors more often than it catches dishonest ones.
- Indoors, use the Check-In block instead. It is a button, or automatic on page load, and the proof of presence is that they were close enough to tap the Marker.
- In a passport, leave Require a check-in at each stop off unless you have added a Check-In block to every stop page.
Pointing at the next thing
- Explore More (free) lists your other published Experiences and badges the ones this visitor has already opened. Leave every box unticked and it shows all of them.
- A Passport doubles as a directory: every stop the visitor has not reached is a tappable link to that stop's page.
- Action Hub (free) puts two to five outcomes in one block: call, directions, the menu, the schedule. Two to five is the range; more than that and it stops being one tap.
- A Button labelled with its destination. Coral Gallery is a better label than Next, because a button's label is what a screen reader announces on its own.
Keeping it consistent
- Mount every Marker at the same height and in the same relationship to the sign it belongs to. Consistency is what turns a Marker into a convention.
- Set the same How guests find it preference across the deployment (Tap, Scan, or Both), so visitors learn one gesture.
- Use the shared header and footer for anything that must be identical everywhere: the logo, a floor-wide contact line, a sponsor credit.
- Test the whole route on one phone before opening. A Marker linked to the wrong floor's Experience is invisible in the builder and obvious on the wall.
Example
The Bellhaven Hotel
The Bellhaven has four guest floors and a conference wing that guests reliably cannot find. There is one Marker in each lift lobby and one at the top of the conference corridor: five Markers, five Experiences, all in a Project called Bellhaven wayfinding.
Each page opens with a Heading naming the floor, then the floor-plan Image with that lobby's dot and Show alt text as caption on, then an Action Hub with four rows: Reception, Restaurant hours, Spa, and Directions to the car park. The conference-corridor page swaps the hub for an Event List block, whose dated items hide themselves once the date passes.
There is no Geo Check-In anywhere in the building. Two of the five lobbies have no usable GPS at all, and the tap already proved the guest was standing there.
Can one Marker show a different map depending on who taps it?
It can change what it shows using a Conditional block on a stored answer (a guest's floor, say), but not by position. There is no indoor positioning in the product, and the honest build is one Marker per place.
Do I need a paid plan for wayfinding?
The blocks that do the work (Image, Map, Directions, Action Hub, Explore More, Button) are all free-plan blocks. Check-In and Geo Check-In are Growth. Without a plan you can link up to three Markers; more needs one.
What do I do about a temporary closure?
Edit the Experience rather than the Marker. Add a Promo Box at the top of the affected pages and remove it when the work finishes. The Marker on the wall never changes, and neither does anything you printed.
Should the map be the first thing on the page?
Under the heading, yes. Somebody who tapped a Marker because they are lost should not have to scroll, and somebody who tapped it for another reason loses one swipe.
Where a Marker goes on the wall decides whether any of this gets used.
Where to place a Marker