Featured Project: Wayfinding for the Traveler

This featured project is from San Francisco International Airport, which, a few years ago, made a decision to upgrade one of its boarding areas and, along with that, its interactive wayfinding signage.

The airport is one of the largest in the United States and features four terminals with seven boarding areas. Serving 45 million travelers annually, it can be a complex place for visitors to find their way around. So, as part of improvements made to Boarding Area E in Terminal 3, the airport decided to implement new signage and it chose the Moxie product from Ontario, Canada-based digital signage software company Omnivex.

The company had used Omnivex’s Display software for many years, but in upgrading to Moxie, airport management was so pleased they plan to make Moxie the standard digital signage platform across the entire airport.

The interactive screens enable travelers to easily find where they need to go anywhere in the airport and the best route to get there, whether by walking or by taking the airport’s automated AirTrain. They also allow passengers to explore their options for dining, shopping and things to do. The Moxie software ties into data in from various sources-maintenance, elevators, emergency alarms, etc.-and devices-RFID, barcode scanners, etc.-so that what users see on the screen reflects the current environment in the facility in real time.

Through the use of what the company calls “conditional formatting,” Omnivex Moxie even factors in information such as elevator operation times and route lighting when determining the best route for getting from point A to B at a particular time of day. The software can also handle multi-floor and multi-region wayfinding on the entire airport grounds.

Content, user experience and user interface design was developed by Bellevue, Washington-based Ilium Associates.