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Blue Dot Navigation For Offices

Mar 23, 2022

7 min read

By: Cara Hueston

Blue dot navigation provides enhanced wayfinding for employees and unlocks a variety of other location-based experiences for offices. Not only can employees take advantage of turn-by-turn directions, but management can collect valuable analytics, send timely alerts, and improve efficiency across workplace operations. 

Blue Dot Navigation for Offices

What is Blue Dot Navigation?

Blue dot navigation refers to the blue circle seen on popular navigation apps such as Google and Apple Maps, which represents your location within a space. As you move, the blue dot updates to reflect your current location. Real-time navigation updates are the difference between blue dot and other wayfinding solutions.  

Indoor Positioning System (IPS)

Indoor positioning systems (IPS) are required to enable blue dot navigation for buildings. IPS is a network of digital devices used to locate people or objects, particularly across indoor buildings where GPS signals cannot penetrate. Blue dot requires indoor positioning technology in order to understand a user’s latitude and longitude and display their location within the context of a digital map. 

Wayfinding and Blue Dot: What's the Difference?

While wayfinding and blue dot both perform the same service of guiding a user from a starting point to their end destination, these two types of navigation differ in their level of detail. In order to provide blue dot navigation, the software must understand your real-time location. This experience is slightly more complex as it depends on indoor positioning technology, but it also yields more accurate positioning and an enhanced wayfinding experience. If a user strays from their path, for example, the navigation will update automatically to guide them back on course.

Standard A-B wayfinding, on the other hand, provides a more simple indoor navigation experience but the advantage is that typical wayfinding does not require any positioning infrastructure. All that is required is for a user to input their start and end destinations, and the map will display the most efficient route from point A to B. Even without positioning, indoor wayfinding can account for multi-floor and multi-destination routes and factor in accessible routes that prioritize ramps and elevators over stairs and escalators.  

Should You Use Indoor Mapping for Your Office in 2022?

Absolutely! Indoor mapping software can help your workplace bring together floor plans, 3D visualizations, spatial data, location-based alerts and analytics, and more. In addition, smart buildings that utilize indoor mapping offer an opportunity for companies, building owners, and occupants to enjoy a digitally connected workplace designed around people - employees, workplace administrators, visitors, and so on. 

Why Use Blue Dot Navigation for Offices?

Office buildings should use blue dot navigation because it provides enhanced wayfinding for employees and unlocks a variety of other location-based experiences. By utilizing indoor positioning technology, not only can employees take advantage of turn-by-turn directions, but management can collect valuable analytics, send timely alerts, and improve workplace operations. 

In the event that employees run into an issue in the workplace, they can make service requests directly through the office map. This might include the service issue and details, employee contact information, a photo or video, and even the ability to link a location through an indoor map, making it easy for workplace teams to locate the problem area in large buildings or complicated indoor spaces. 

Turn-By-Turn Directions Proven to Improve the Visitor Experience

Accurate digital maps make navigation easy for employees and visitors. Office maps can display recommended parking lots and provide turn-by-turn directions to reception areas or amenities within the building. Location details along with the visual blue dot provide context to new employees or first-time visitors, updating as they move and quickly familiarizing them within the venue.  

Management & Analytics

By implementing digital maps of your workspace, office administrators can collect and review valuable analytics. An indoor mapping platform, and particularly one that is combined with an Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS), gives businesses a way to store, track, and review detailed analytics about workplace operations. 

Teams can report on how space has been used on a weekly, daily, or even hourly basis to help inform their decisions on policies such as space usage and capacity. Contact monitoring, room booking, cleaning requests, and visitor management are just some of the metrics that facilities teams may investigate to help ensure the safety and efficiency of their workplace.   

Location-Based Alerts

Through the use of indoor positioning and mapping SDKs for offices, workplaces can improve day-to-day building management, send workplace alerts, and display building events and messaging. An integrated Building Management System (BMS) can send alerts to staff when heating, cooling, or lighting needs to be adjusted and allow facilities teams to easily make adjustments, even if they are not inside the physical space. 

Combined with accurate location data, this system can also alert employees about ongoing building maintenance, fire drills, and real-time appointment reminder texts. In addition to high priority alerts, offices can enhance employee culture and recognition by integrating the wayfinding SDK with an existing digital signage application. Promote company news or events, celebrate milestones, highlight new employees, and more.

What Sets Mappedin Apart?

Scalable

Whether you hope you build a mapping experience across mobile, web, kiosk, or all three, the Mappedin platform is built with scale in mind. Any changes made within the Map Editor to your office building map will be deployed across all visitor-facing platforms. Mappedin is also designed for businesses with many office buildings around the world. The editor stores each unique floor plan under one account so office administrators can seamlessly switch between them. Or, assign permissions to specific who at your company has control over which maps.  

Versatile

Mappedin’s indoor mapping platform enables versatile navigation experiences across your entire portfolio of digital touchpoints. From your website, to mobile applications and touchscreen digital directories, visitors and employees alike can rely on an accurate and intuitive wayfinding experience. With simplified map editor tools, our platform makes maintaining, updating, and analyzing your office maps a simple task. 

Integrable

Mappedin’s wayfinding SDKs for offices are highly integrable with other datasets and technologies. These mapping SDKs provide developers with a flexible indoor outdoor navigation solution and Mappedin’s location platform allows office buildings to maintain accurate floor plans over time. Our SDKs encompass a wide variety of components and features required to easily integrate blue dot technology into any application, from campus navigation apps to shopping mall turn-by-turn directions.  

Robust

Mappedin offers robust documentation to our customers, something that is imperative for a smooth integration of your office map. These resources include comprehensive API documentation, sample applications, and step-by-step guides to ensure a successful implementation of your office map.

Blue Dot Navigation for Offices Frequently Asked Questions

How Do You Use an Indoor Positioning System?

An indoor positioning system is a network of devices used to locate people or objects, specifically in locations where GPS lacks precision or is not an option. Indoor positioning and indoor mapping are two separate systems, but can be used in conjunction to provide an enhanced navigation experience. 

How Does Your Phone Know Where You Are?

Your phone locates your current location using some form of real-time positioning technology where your latitude and longitude are collected. This might be through geomagnetic, beacon, wi-fi access points, radio signals, RFID, or inertial sensors. 

Do You Need Internet Connection While Navigating?

No, once the map has been loaded, there is no need to be connected to the internet for blue dot wayfinding from one location to another. The essential blue dot experience does require indoor positioning GPS, but will function without an internet connection. For blue dot using Apple devices, wi-fi should be on but does not need to be connected to venue wi-fi. In this way, positioning systems can see access points and blue dot positioning will work in its more accurate form. Contact us to get started.