For those customers who utilize our wayfinding functionality, you’re going to see a lot of great enhancements in the next release of our software, version 5.4. We’ve enhanced the editor to make it more intuitive and user-friendly, added new functionality and addressed a few frequent user requests along the way. Let’s take a sneak peek at the progress, and what you can expect in 5.4!
Consolidated and Organized Layout
The wayfinding window, where you manage your locations and paths, has seen a dramatic upgrade. First, we consolidated functionality, which was previously spread between the properties window and the wayfinding window. Now, you can manage your floor maps, your “You Are Here” (YAH) location and your wayfinding routing properties all from the wayfinding window, without jumping back and forth.
Also, taking cues from common UX (User Experience) standards, we’ve added a toolbar to the left side of the screen. When you select a tool, such as locations or floors, relevant information and options are now displayed in the right-side panel. This is a much cleaner, simplified experience than the previous tabbed layout.
Below is a snapshot of the layout, coming in 5.4:
New Functionality
In addition to making wayfinding easier, we’ve added new tools for greater control over wayfinding animations and routing.
Route Animation Speed
One common request was to define a wayfinding routing speed, rather than a routing duration. Using durations can cause short or long routes to animate too slowly or too quickly, respectively. By adding speed, you can have a consistent animation speed across all paths. So yeah... we did it.
Turn-By-Turn Breadcrumbs
We also added the ability to pause a route animation and trigger custom content at any point along a path. This could be as simple as displaying breadcrumb directions for that point, such as “Turn left at the service counter.” Because of the inherent power of our triggering, this could also perform more complicated tasks, such as displaying an image or video associated with a point to provide the end user with very clear directions.
Routing Pagination
And finally, just in case the route was not clear enough the first time through, or if they missed a step, we have added the ability to manually paginate through the wayfinding item. So a user could choose to go back and see a step again, or fast-forward to the point where they are unsure.
These tools combined will allow for some very compelling use cases moving forward, and we are excited to see how our user base takes advantage of the new toys. And look for more features and functionality to surface as we get closer to our 5.4 release!
#DoYouFWI? If you have any other ideas for wayfinding enhancements, be sure to visit the Community and drop them in the Ideas forum!
