Beyond the “Blue Dot”: Rethinking Wayfinding for Visitor Attractions
How Pladia treats indoor Wayfinding as a visitor-centered design challenge, not a technical one
Andi Mastrosavas, CEO at Pladia, reflects on a new approach to wayfinding that embraces how visitors naturally explore museums.
The early promise of indoor positioning
From the beginning, there was a belief in location-aware visitor experiences, buoyed by market predictions that indoor positioning technologies would become ubiquitous.
“We envisioned many popular venues becoming ‘location-aware’ with indoor positioning systems as common as GPS for outdoor navigation. But that future never quite arrived.” — Nic Whyte, Co-founder
The reality proved more complex than anticipated. Setup, maintenance, and ensuring reliability and compatibility required constant attention. In most cases, especially in large buildings where only specific areas needed location-awareness (such as touring or temporary exhibitions), Bluetooth beacons were sufficient. For larger, site-wide deployments, solutions like Apple Indoor (for Apple devices) and IndoorAtlas (for Android) emerged as go-to technologies.
“Apple Indoor worked relatively well in these venues, but struggled at the indoor-outdoor boundaries, and there were numerous setup requirements, including having the IMDF generated, maintained, and approved by Apple.” — Nic Whyte, Co-founder, Pladia
Moreover, visitor behavior presented another challenge. Due to factors like app fatigue, privacy concerns, and storage constraints, visitors increasingly avoid downloading additional apps. Reports show a decreasing trend in app downloads per year, with people focusing on a small number of frequently used apps rather than exploring new ones.
We needed to rethink our approach entirely.
Wayfinding as a PWA-first design problem
To remove these barriers for visitors and reduce dependencies and overhead for institutions, Pladia adopted a Progressive Web Application (PWA)-first approach. This allows visitors to load an app-like experience on their mobile devices without downloading anything.
Removing that friction was only step one. The next challenge became how to approximate location awareness on a PWA to deliver an effective digital wayfinding solution.
We quickly realized this was as much of a design problem as a technical one. Our Product designers developed new approaches to wayfinding support without relying on precise spatial data. Ultimately, we created a beacon-free approach that eliminates the need for indoor positioning by using alternative methods to identify a visitor’s location and guide them through indoor spaces.
Wayfinding works best when combined
Through extensive wayfinding studies in museums, we observed how visitors navigated spaces using early prototypes of our solution. Visitors were asked to find specific objects and reflect on what helped them most.
The studies confirmed our assumption: successful wayfinding relies on a combination of physical and digital elements — signage, buildings, landmark objects, maps, and directional cues.
“None of the research participants used just one modality to find their way, they all relied on multiple different inputs at different moments.” — Madeleine van Venetie, Lead UX Designer
For example, visitors would identify their destination on a map, follow building signage to the general area, and then look around for landmarks like a specific room or wall label to confirm they had arrived.
“I knew that it was up here because of the app. But then the physical signage helped me get there.” — Research participant
Bathrooms proved to be particularly useful landmarks due to their predictable placement and recognizability. Knowing that something was ‘near the bathrooms’ was a helpful prompt for visitors looking for an object.
“We’re passing the bathrooms which I can see on the map.” — Research participant
The power of “almost right”
Interestingly, many visitors mentioned they don’t always need a high level of precision, since part of the joy of a museum is wandering and discovering new things. Often, giving a direction to start walking in was enough to satisfy them that they would eventually get to the object in question while enjoying their journey along the way. At minimum, visitors just need to know the space and level of their destination before choosing to wander to the correct level and explore spaces that pique their interest.
“This informed that our solution needed to balance the ability to find something specific with the joy of serendipitous discovery.” — Via David, Senior Product Designer
The way we measure success at Pladia is different from many others. We aren’t looking for increased screen time as a measure of whether we’ve created an improved visitor experience. Instead, we want to help visitors find what they’re looking for, enjoy a museum visit that matches their interests, and discover meaning along the way.
After all, in the cultural sector, it’s about the journey as much as the destination.
