How to Build Indoor Navigation Maps for Venues and Buildings?

Without clear directions or easily accessible information, navigating large or complex buildings generally becomes a challenge. Especially when confusing layouts and inadequate signage leave visitors feeling disoriented, frustrated, and lost. As a result, it leads to delays, missed appointments even loss of business opportunities.

Indoor maps are emerging as tremendous navigation solutions that transform customers’ navigation experience in indoor environments.

Among the many uses of indoor navigation technology for companies are mapping large buildings and reducing energy consumption, improving safety, minimizing space management costs, and so forth.

If you manage a large building whether it’s a corporate office, shopping mall, hospital, or airport, you must have an idea of how challenging it can be for people to find their way in such complex spaces.

Indoor navigation maps can be a game changer by guiding visitors or employees to reach their destination with ease.

Source: Global Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation Market Size

Some studies show that the global indoor navigation market size is growing enormously and is expected to reach USD 30.20 billion by 2030.  This growth is majorly influenced by soaring demand for augmented reality(AR), location-based analytics, and proximity marketing.

What’s An Indoor Navigation Map And How To Create One? This blog will show you how you can create a simple navigation with all the required features.

Additionally, we will shed some light on the aspects you should keep in mind that improve user experience, enhance efficiency, and reduce confusion. Let’s start:

What is an Indoor Navigation Map?

The indoor map can be considered as a detailed floor plan of every floor that consists of every floor, path, location, lift, and much more. These maps can be shown on mobile apps (Android or iOS) and other platforms.

With the help of this map, users can easily zoom in and out on each corner of the space and get more information in detail about zones of interest like shops.

In most cases, a side panel is displayed along with the indoor map, depending on how the indoor map is integrated (widget or fully custom). When you click a location, this side panel displays information about the location, its opening hours, photos, and contact information.

Who Needs Indoor Navigation Map?

The requirements of these indoor navigation maps majorly depend on the space and complexities of the building. Several businesses are using indoor navigation maps to guide the path to their visitors, directly or indirectly aiding businesses to have improved visitor experience. Here we’ve mentioned the top major industries that need indoor navigation maps:

• Retail

Indoor navigation emerges as a great way for visitors to have smooth navigation through stores in supermarkets. The indoor navigation apps focus on making the visiting experience hassle-free by allowing them to find their desired shop or product quickly. In retail, indoor maps can aid in many tasks like:

1. Help in developing shelves, products, and routes
2. Offers turn-by-turn navigation with high search accuracy
3. Building store maps with POI (points of interest)
4. Depending on the visitor’s location, sending push alerts about sales and discounts

• Shopping Malls

Having an indoor navigation map can save enough time that generally gets spent in finding the right shops, cafes restaurants, boutiques, and so forth.

With the navigation map, shoppers receive a detailed digital map that allows them to find their desired destination like restrooms and many other amenities with ease.

These systems positively impact user experience and give satisfaction after visiting the shopping malls.

• Office Buildings And Business Towers

Often business towers and large business centers entail complex navigation and lead employees and visitors to troublesome navigation experiences. When your visitors spend enough time wandering the floor by floor to find their destination, it ultimately impacts their loyalty to the company.

Fortunately, indoor navigation maps eliminate such issues by creating quick routes to any destination easily. Apart from all, using indoor navigation can significantly boost working time by 10 to 20%.

• Hospitals

Finding the doctor’s office, procedure room, and other places in hospitals can be indeed stressful in large hospitals. Indoor maps create the shortest way to reach your destination, which is essential when visiting a large hospital with many other separate buildings.

Patients and visitors with the mobile app can use features such as:

1. Creating routes to any destination
2. Real-time turn-by-turn guidance within a medical facility’s grounds
3. Making a remote appointment
4. Getting a customized push alert with tips
5. Creating hospital floor plans that include rooms and wards 

• Colleges And Universities

Indoor navigation has been introduced as a great solution for educational institutions, especially colleges with multiple buildings and large campuses. It offers teachers, new students or staff a smooth navigation through the buildings.

1. Searching for buildings
2. creating paths to any location on the campus map
3. Quick access to classrooms with real-time navigation

• Transportation Hubs

Every day many Individuals miss their trains, flights, and buses, and the major reason generally comes out as complex navigation. Indoor navigation systems.

Having useful mobile applications for train stations, airports, and other transportation hubs will ease passenger journeys by allowing them to quickly find ticket offices, check-in counters, cafeterias, and restrooms. The system offers turn-by-turn navigation through terminals and creates fast routes.

Hence, it ends up increasing passenger loyalty to that specific transport zone and decreases the number of train/plane delays.

• Museum and Exhibitions

Indoor navigation maps help medium visitors in many ways and provide a satisfying visiting experience.

The system creates routes, maps out museum halls, and ensures that you can easily find a way to their interest without any hassle.

Additionally, large-scale expositions are easy to navigate and provide plenty of helpful information about the displays. Indoor navigation technology is frequently utilized to provide smart guides that will help you better understand the museum and build customized mini-tours.

• Multi-Level Car Parking

Generally, shopping malls, airports, hospitals, and many other large centers use several levels of parking. This multilevel car parking often makes the visitors confused even when finding their own vehicle, at that moment indoor positioning system allows them to navigate easily.

Factors to Consider When Creating an Indoor Navigation Map

Are you wondering how to create an indoor navigation map for your business? With an indoor navigation map, your visitors will enjoy a better experience and you’ll be able to communicate with them more effectively. The algorithm generates directions for the shortest ways for users.

Indoor navigation technology benefits businesses of any size and both can use it whether they are users or facility managers.

Moreover, these indoor maps allow you to collect data like the time of each visit of people, areas visited, duration, and number of interactions with devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT).

In order to create an indoor map of your building, share notifications, and send and receive data, there are a number of things that your indoor navigation map needs to make all this happen.

Here is how the indoor map is created:

• Have Clear Goals

Defining your map goals is essential when building indoor navigation. Any number of specific reasons may necessitate the use of an IPS in your industry or workspaces like workspace efficiency and building owner’s security or maybe to offer better and seamless services for your visitors, including office buildings, campuses, or museums.

The capacity to make revisions and generate an accurate map of your venue may be a priority in shopping malls, as retail stores may either close or reopen. In addition, train stations, airports, and malls may find navigation maps helpful in many ways. These maps allow individuals to find their platforms, shops, and terminals with more ease.

In simpler words, as per your industry requirements, here we’ve curated some of the key goals for your Indoor navigation app:

1. Better planning and space management
2. Increased safety and security
3. Data collection and management
4. Distance calculation
5. Enhanced visitor experience
6. Improved productivity

• Find The Best Indoor Mapping & Navigation Solutions

This step is to find the most suitable mapping solutions and ensure which indoor mapping solutions suit the best to your requirements. To ease your complexity, we have brought some tips to keep in mind when choosing indoor mapping and navigation.

1. Expertise: Always prefer conducting good research before partnering with any company. There are plenty of ways in the market that help you find the right app development companies that are trustworthy and reliable.
2. The number of clients they have worked with: well, this step is as crucial as years of experience. A company that has been in the market for a very long time but doesn’t have many case studies can be a matter of concern.
3. Square feet mapped: you can ask how many square feet they have mapped to your indoor mapping solution provider. It will provide you with a clearer picture of how much work they have successfully done in this industry. Apart from that, it will give ideas on whether they can work on projects.
4. Add-ons and collaboration ability: these aspects are that you can’t overlook. Many businesses want their indoor mapping solutions to seamlessly work with their existing technology. For instance, they can easily integrate with your current website and offer the flexibility to have constant add-ons to your system from time to time.
5. Support: ensure the services provider you are considering is providing a robust support system to your company. Technological bugs and system failures can create hurdles in user experience especially when your indoor mapping solution is for a shopping center. Therefore, make sure your service provider offers you sufficient 24/7 support.

• Initiate Your Floor Plan

Features of indoor navigation programs vary from project to project. Every service provider has their ways of creating indoor maps, one thing that is common in all of them is that all of them share the fact that your indoor 2D map, or floor plan, serves as the foundation for your indoor 3D mapping project.

Moreover, you need to be consistent when creating your indoor apps, additionally, ensure that you leverage automation to create them at scale. Moreover, your 2D maps can be converted into 3D indoor maps from several different perspectives.

Accuracy and consistency are vital for indoor maps since precise and accurate location data helps provide clarity and consistency while saving you time in the future when you’ll need to add new details.

• Locate Key Points Of Interest

In order to facilitate navigation, your solution should enable you to incorporate points of interest (POIs). POIs can include access points, amenities, visitor safety features, etc. Below are POIs to consider in your indoor map:

1. Vending machines
2. ATMs
3. Payphones
4. Bathrooms
5. Security desks
6. Elevators POIs

POIs help improve your indoor maps and navigation experience by making it easy to find their areas of interest quickly. You can consider including a legend to represent each service on your indoor map, so the user can easily find what they need and where they can find it.

• Incorporate Your Branding

Undoubtedly, your branding plays a vital role in the success of your indoor map. It demonstrates how your visitors see your products. Incorporating your logo in an indoor map ensures that your map is branded and reflects the style of your unique. In addition, you can also bout matching your brand’s colors and typeface.

How To Create Indoor Navigation Maps For Applications And Web Platforms?

Creating an indoor navigation map that runs smoothly requires professional expertise. Here we have mentioned some crucial tips to help you throughout the development process. Let’s get started:

• Gather detailed floor plans and data

In this development guide, the first step is to obtain all the floor plans in detail. precise management, room labels, and other vital information are required to create indoor navigation that accurately reflects the venue. Similarly, look for some additional information including the location of entry and exit points, elevators, stairs, restrooms, cafe, and other essential amenities.

• Choose the right indoor mapping software

In accordance with your needs and requirements opt for indoor mapping software or platform. There are numerous tools available that provide easy features like 3D mapping, integration with indoor positioning systems, and drag-drop interface.

• Digitize the floor plans

Utilizing the selected mapping program, digitize the collected floor plans. This process simply involves tracing the floor plans to create accurate and more detailed maps.

• Integrate indoor positioning systems (IPS)

If you want to have real-time navigation, consider integrating the indoor positioning system (IPS ) like Bluetooth beacons, Wi-Fi positioning, and RFID tags. Here indoor positioning system helps ensure the user’s location in the building with accuracy.

• Design user interface and user experience

Always focus on building a user-friendly interface for your indoor navigation app. You may include symbols, intuitive icons, and various location labels on the map. Additionally, opt for features like turn-by-turn directions, search functionality, and interactive elements to improve the user experience.

• Test the indoor navigation system

The next step entails conducting extensive testing of your navigation system. You need to test numerous scenarios for instance routes, starting, points, and destinations to adhere with accuracy and reliability.

• Implement augmented reality (optional)

If you want a navigation system that prioritizes the user experience, you must consider adding augmented reality.

AR (Augmented Reality) enhances navigation by blending digital information with the real world, using the camera on your smartphone. With our AR-based software solutions, you may easily create an app that connects the digital and physical worlds, offering an interactive and immersive experience for users.

• Launch and gather user feedback

User feedback is a great way to improve your app accordingly, launching the indoor navigation and gathering feedback the the last step in this process. You need to be attentive to the user’s reviews and comments to find the possibilities to improve. Consider regularly updating the systems in accordance with the user’s feedback and satisfy the user’s requirements.

Final Words!

In this fiercely competitive era, all your business requires a seamless customer experience to get success. Creating indoor maps with some cool features can help your visitors in many ways.

With the right blend of technologies like Wi-Fi, UWB, BLE, etc. planning businesses can effectively create systems that help individuals to navigate through large and complex areas.

Apart from that, maps can help executives update their information, guide important decisions, and efficiently plan resources and facilities.

Create A Better Navigation Experience With Appventurez!

Partnering with a professional app development company can allow you to have your indoor maps up and running quickly. With the help of experts, you’ll be able to edit and maintain your indoor maps yourself as your venue changes so you can ensure long-term accuracy.

There are many indoor mapping companies but choosing the right one is crucial. Since Appventurez has already established itself as one of the best app development companies, you can trust us for your next indoor navigation map solutions.

Additionally, our experts at Appventurez can make recommendations and offer the best practices for your indoor navigation map while saving time and money for you. Reach out to us today!