How to Choose a Digital Wayfinding Solution
So you’ve decided it’s time for your business to offer a digital wayfinding solution. Great! You’re joining a growing number of industries that use digital wayfinding to enhance guest experiences, increase revenue opportunities, and communicate with crowds across large facilities. Custom digital wayfinding kiosks are becoming more popular in airports, malls, healthcare centers, stadiums, and other large buildings and campuses that serve a high volume of guests and staff each day.
While digital wayfinding is a simple concept (check out this blog to learn more about what it is), designing a digital wayfinding solution can be quite complex. Today, we’ll walk you through a couple things you should consider before getting started and discuss some of the features you’ll want your digital wayfinding solution to include.
Understand Your Business Objectives and Identify Guest Frustrations in Your Space
The first step of designing a wayfinding solution is to define your business objectives. Why are you investing in a digital wayfinding solution? What problem(s) do you want the solution to solve? How will you measure success after your solution is deployed? These are examples of questions you should be prepared to answer. It’s important for you and the people who are designing and engineering your solution to have a thorough understanding of what you are hoping to accomplish, as well as how you’ll determine if the solution is successful.
Identifying guest frustrations in your space goes hand in hand with identifying your business objectives. If you want your digital wayfinding solution to solve problems in your space, you must first have a thorough understanding of what those problems are. One of the best ways to go about this is through guest and stakeholder surveys. By talking with people who work in your facility in all capacities, you’ll be able to identify the guest frustrations your solution should address. Reducing the amount of time your guests spend wayfinding, among other possible frustrations, is a major component of enhancing guest experiences.
How to Choose a Wayfinding Solution that Delivers a Great ROI
If you’re investing in a digital wayfinding solution, make sure it incorporates features that will help deliver a great return on investment. A well-designed digital wayfinding solution can create customer or guest loyalty, increase tenant occupancy rate and rent, introduce customers to new stores or vendors, lower staff counts, and make your facility a destination of choice in the area.
At Oppna Digital, we’ve found wayfinding solutions that incorporate the following features have the best chance of delivering an impressive ROI:
● Integration with Existing Applications - Wayfinding solutions that integrate with existing applications save a lot of time and headaches. Choose a solution that can easily integrate with your parking or event management software, data warehouse, existing content management system, etc. to save you time and energy in other areas of your business.
● Marketing and Advertising - The crisp screens on digital wayfinding kiosks can double as space for marketing and advertising. Choose a solution that can display digital ads to direct your guests to the latest promotions, events, and updates.
● Advanced Analytics - Digital wayfinding solutions can track every touch that happens on their screens. These analytics can be used to both improve the solution over time and help you identify user habits to address through your marketing and user experience efforts. Choose a solution that provides rich, actionable analytics.
● Well-Designed User Interface - We can’t say enough about how important it is for your digital wayfinding solution to have a well-designed user interface. It should be intuitive and easy to learn so users don’t become confused or frustrated. At the same time, the design should be attractive and inviting while adhering to your brand guidelines. Choose a digital wayfinding solution that offers pixel-perfect design and animation.
● Attractive Hardware - The technology in a digital wayfinding solution needs to be protected by hardware, and the best hardware offers more than just protection—it impresses and attracts guests. Choose a digital wayfinding solution that offers a variety of quality, commercial-grade kiosk enclosures to choose from.
Contact Oppna Digital for One-of-a-Kind Wayfinding Solutions
At Oppna Digital, we’ve developed custom interactive wayfinding kiosks for several large facilities across the United States, including a project with over 100 touchscreen wayfinding kiosks for the Mall of America. To schedule a consultation and to learn how digital wayfinding technology can enhance your business, give us a call at 651-237-5677, or fill out this form to request a demo.