4 Keys to Selecting a Great Digital Wayfinding Solution

Digital wayfinding solutions promote better guest experiences by providing customer information, gathering data about customers, learning from this data, and using it to interact with guests more strategically. Research shows the digital wayfinding industry is growing rapidly and for good reason—today’s consumers rely heavily on technology and have a ton of choices when it comes to where they spend their time and money. If you want to stay top of mind among your target audience and ahead of your competitors, having the right technology and a keen focus on guest experience is absolutely necessary.

While you’re surveying the digital wayfinding landscape, we’re here to help you make an informed decision. At Oppna Digital, we understand selecting a great digital wayfinding solution can be a tedious process. Today we’ll walk you through four critical steps, providing guidance along the way.

Identify Your Goals

Before meeting with a digital wayfinding developer, be sure you have a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish. Setting specific, strategic goals before you pursue a digital wayfinding solution will help you focus your efforts and spend your budget more wisely. When you do choose a digital partner (see below), make sure you’re working closely with the team who will be creating and implementing your digital wayfinding solution to ensure everyone is on the same page about what you hope to accomplish.

Examples of digital wayfinding goals (one or all can be applicable):

●        Improve guest experience

●        Increase products or services sold

●        Increase sales per customer

●        Decrease staff time required for servicing customers

●        Reduce cost of flyers, leaflets, poster campaigns, and other printed marketing materials

Along with clearly identifying your goals for your wayfinding solution, you’ll need to know how you’ll measure success. Developing a solution that provides comprehensive analytics is your best bet. If your developer can’t tell you specifics about how users are interacting with their solutions, they’re not the right partner for you.

Choose a Collaborative Partner

You know your business better than anyone else. For this reason, it’s important to choose a highly collaborative digital partner to design your wayfinding solution. While you understand your industry, your partner should understand how to provide solutions for your pain points and unique business goals. Working closely together is the best way to ensure your solution lives up to everything you envision.

We also highly suggest selecting a partner like Oppna Digital that has the ability to improve your solution over time. As users interact with your wayfinding applications (kisos, mobile app, or website), you want to be able to track every touch and analyze the results. This information can be used to enhance the user experience and user interface based on actual data and utilization analytics.

Finally, we recommend selecting a digital partner that provides a harmonized software and hardware solution. If your partner only provides the software and outsources the hardware—or vice versa—there are more opportunities for flaws in the system. Plus, when you work with a single-source provider, your project is more likely to stay on schedule and within budget.

Utilize Project Management

Developing and implementing a digital wayfinding solution involves several processes, including software development, creative design, hardware procurement, implementation, and more. Keep your project on track with a project management installation process that includes best practices and guidelines. We recommend utilizing the Project Management Institute’s process or working with a digital partner who offers this.

Have a Plan for IT Support

Even a best-of-breed digital wayfinding solution needs IT support at some point. This is a critical step that’s often overlooked. Many tech companies will design solutions for you, but their work stops once they have been implemented. Unless you’d like to scramble for IT help when an issue arises, we suggest having a plan for competent IT support or choosing a partner that provides 24/7 availability.

Better yet, choose a provider that is constantly monitoring and updating your system! Even if your digital wayfinding kiosks experience no technical difficulties, why would you want to “set it and forget it” when you can have a solution that proactively monitors that includes health checks all designed to improve over time?

We Build Real, Authentic Partnerships

When you work with Oppna Digital, you get a full-service partner. Our services are highly relationship-based with a focus on providing custom solutions that are user and operator-friendly. Our support model includes key metrics to drive continuous application improvement, so your solution will only become more useful and advanced over time. Interested to learn more? Please contact us today to schedule a demo.