What is digital wayfinding for a garden centre?

Digital wayfinding for a garden centre is a digital map of the whole site, indoors and outdoors, that visitors open on their own phone or on a screen. It gives routes to departments, the café, the toilets and the car park, and the garden centre's own team keeps it up to date.

Garden centres don't often think of themselves as needing wayfinding. But a visitor who came in for compost, wandered out to the plant area and now can't see the way back to the tills has a wayfinding problem, and so does the member of staff they stop to ask.

A shopping centre is typically an indoor space set within one or more large buildings. A garden centre is often much smaller site and is typically several smaller buildings joined together with some open space in between:

• Indoor halls and glasshouses, with outdoor plant areas between and around them
• Departments that grow, shrink and move with the seasons
• A café, a restaurant or events space that people visit in their own right
• A large car park, sometimes with more than one entrance

All of that makes it harder for a first-time visitor to understand the site, and it means a printed map goes out of date quickly.

A typical garden centre digital map project might include:

• A web map, linked from the garden centre's website, that visitors open on their own phones - on site and at home before arriving - with nothing to download. This helps integrate the garden centre's online presence with the actual garden centre, as well as giving the operator of the garden centre some valuble insight into what each (anonymous) map visitor is searching for.
• QR codes at the entrances and by the tills that open the map where the visitor is standing. Visitors can scan the QR code with their mobile phones and be taken to the digital map on the garden centre's own website
• Departments, the café, toilets and the car park marked on the map
• Step-free routes across the site, indoors and out. This will help draw visitors with disabilities to the garden centre.
• Seasonal areas updated by the garden centre's own team through the Map Management System (MMS) - the Living Map team can also provide this service if the resource isn't available in-house to do this. 

This is an illustration of how a project can be scoped - each project differs according to layout, budget, needs etc of the owner/operator of the garden centre.

The garden centre's own team can update the map through the MMS, and the Living Map team can take on some or all of the updates. How the work is shared depends on the team's resources and how often the map needs to change. As Nick Jeffery, who heads up Operations at Living Map, said in a recent interview: “The aim is for clients to feel entirely confident in making changes themselves, freeing them from reliance on us for routine updates.”

Yes. The café can sit on the map as a destination with what it serves, including dietary information, and the team can promote offers and events through pop-ups on the map. Allergy information always needs to come from the garden centre or its caterer.

Large sites that mix buildings and outdoor space are a good fit for this kind of map. At Glenstone Museum, Valentina Nahon, Senior Director of Public Engagement, Glenstone, said: “Living Map not only helps visitors navigate the site but helps them discover more about the art, architecture and nature at Glenstone”.

Start with wayfinding. What we tend to see is that a standard wayfinding map evolves as the relationship, the space and the technology evolve. Layers of other services and nearby locations are added, and as other people in the organisation see the benefit, they use the same map for other purposes. 

If you want to know what drives the cost, see how much does digital wayfinding cost?

If you run a garden centre and wonder what this would look like on your site, happy to talk it through.