Business
Aalborg University (AAU) is a Danish university with around 20.000 students enrolled across the 6 campuses in three Danish cities: Aalborg, Esbjerg and Copenhagen. Several internal studies at Aalborg University showed that students, staff and visitors were finding it hard to navigate the vast campus areas spread across several locations. To solve this issue, the university management at AAU wanted to offer an indoor wayfinding app and interactive wayfinding on their website.
“AAUs buildings were built at different points in time, which can make them difficult for people to navigate in. The different building phases have not only affected the layout of the buildings but also the naming of auditoriums, lecture rooms and meeting rooms, which makes it even harder to find your way around”, says Bente Siggaard Andersen, Project Manager from AAU in Aalborg.
Because of the fact that the university campuses are spread across different locations around the cities, it was important that the transition from outdoor to indoor navigation was seamless. AAU also wanted to offer students and staff the opportunity to search for a number of relevant categories within the university campus, such as printers, canteens and of course specific class and meeting rooms.
Solution
Together with AAU, MapsPeople developed an indoor navigation solution, which could help students, staff and visitors find what their way around AAU in Aalborg, Esbjerg and Copenhagen. 9730 rooms and a total of 251,338 square metres were mapped in the first version of the AAU Map, which was made available to users at the end of December 2016.
Via the search functionality, users can search for a wide range of categories such as restrooms, class and meeting rooms and canteens. AAU will launch a new version of the app every quarter including routing improvements and updates based on feedback from the users. They also plan to launch a new feature, making it possible for the AAU App to interface with the student’s personal timetables. Another upcoming feature is to combine personnel data with location data, so the users will be able to search for a member of staff and see their office in the app.
Benefits
Students, staff and visitors at Aalborg University now have indoor navigation at their fingertips and can benefit from a range of options in AAU Map:
- Get a route from their current location and all the way to a specific classroom
- Search for and find a wide range of points of interest such as restrooms, canteens, meeting rooms and printers
- Copy a point of interest and include it in an email to provide the route to a specific location eg. for a study group or lunch meeting
- See temporary points of interest added by the university management – for example for events like “Karrieredagene” or university parties.
- Through the MapsIndoors CMS, the admin users at AAU can easily edit and update the points of interest shown on the map. They can add temporary points of interest for specific events and set them to disappear on a chosen end date. Information and images at specific points of interest is also easily updated via the CMS.
Reduces stress and chaos
Employees spend less time giving directions
Seamless outdoor to indoor navigation allows users to easily navigate between locations 
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