Wayfinding for the National Gallery Singapore
The National Gallery in Singapore is a complex venue to navigate and map!
The complexity stems from the fact that it really is two buildings linked together, meaning that walking from one end to the other often isn’t as simple as it sounds. Throw in constantly changing events and pop-ups and navigating becomes a dynamic challenge.
Working with the Gallery and Flex-Solver team on this challenge is a great journey and now we are starting to see the fruition of all the hard work materialising itself in the many kiosks that are in and around the building.
Aside from the architectural challenges of creating logical routes, the maps need to be deployed across multiple platforms and while we see them on the Kiosks initially, there are plans afoot to deliver the same experience across mobile, website and more.
On the technical side, integrating into the kiosk applications as well as Gallery’s CMS solution again poses unique hurdles that we have enjoyed discussing and resolving to ensure that there is a single source of truth and from a user perspective, they do not feel like they are working with different systems to achieve their objectives.
The User Interface and Experience is another evolving item that will see multiple iterations as feedback and technology improves. The objective remains the same and that is to make the Gallery more discoverable and enable a visitor to have a better orientation to get to where they want to go. The routing and its complexity will develop as multi route journeys and logic come to the table integrating into more personalised routes and experiences.
The brand visuals and the style also went through many journeys to get where they are, colours can be subjective and we are sure will cause positive and negative feedback but if the objective of the map is being achieved this becomes a secondary priority. We are playing around with models and other exciting aids to enhance the UI further and we look forward to rolling these out in due course.
The maps and wayfinding journey is at its start with the National Gallery Singapore and we look forward to supporting this amazing institution on its path in delivering a world class visitor experience.