Guidelight
Emily Lau
I primarily led the design and development on this project, and Emily led the research and user testing portions.
Guidelight is a navigation app designed for people with mobility disabilities,
providing accessible directions seamlessly between both exterior and interior spaces.
Existing navigation apps often don't provide safe and efficent step-free
routes, and accessibility features that buildings have are usually missing or unlabeled. This causes the
accessible routes that these apps can provide to be inefficient, overly long, or even unsafe.
Indoor building data is almost always incomplete or even completely missing, forcing users to switch to
other apps or websites to navigate indoors.
Guidelight allows users to use a single app to navigate the entire journey, from one room in a building
to another, without having to worry about the route being unsafe or inaccessible.
Like most navigation apps, the current and next direction are displayed at the top, with estimated travel time, distance, and arrival time at the bottom. Because Guidelight has detailed floorplans, it knows the best entrances and exits to use, and it knows automatically to avoid stairs and other permanent obstacles.
One of our goals was that for navigation that doesn't require cars or transit, that Guidelight could be used as your primary navigation app. The app has features people will be familiar with, like favorite places, and especially for search, has all of the information that a user would want to know, like a location's hours. There's also a crowdsourced accessibility rating alongside a traditional location rating, and you can quickly jump to a company's website or call them, you can see photos, etc.
The route setup screen feels familiar to other map apps, but with the added feature of being able to choose a room number (or store aisle, a store in a mall, an airport gate, etc.) and seeing building floorplans. Guidelight will try to estimate which floor you're on, but there's also a button to switch between them.
The transition between indoor and outdoor navigation is seamless, with the map
automatically showing the floorplan for the correct floor (though you can correct it if it's wrong),
and navigating the user through the most efficent exits and entrances for the final destination.
Existing apps don’t have interior data at all for locations like schools, stores, or most other
places so they can’t direct you at all between rooms. For locations that have indoor data, the
information is often scattered across their own own apps, websites, or PDFs (without live routing).
Elevators cause a problem for automatic navigation, requiring the app to know for sure that the user made it to the correct floor. Guidelight gets around this by prompting the user to confirm that they arrived at the right floor, and if not, reroutes them, likely back to the elevator.
The main route following experience is very similar to existing apps, without major changes to the core experience. The app tells the user the directions to follow, and reroutes when necessary.
Temporary barriers like construction, blocked elevators, broken sidewalks, etc. change constantly, and as such, do not appear on existing navigation apps, but they can make trips significantly more difficult for wheelchair users. This often forces people to guess the route and increases backtracking, making the experience stressful and unpredictable. Guidelight's reporting system allows users to report a blocked path, and optionally include a photo of the block to show as an alert for other users.
Alerts take over the whole map screen, with the photo if it was included in the report, importantly, instructions to reroute to avoid the block. The new route could be as simple as turning to the right, or more complicated depending on the location. Guidelight also asks whether the block is still happening, and if a user says it's not, the alerts will stop for everyone.
When entering a building, it can take a moment for the app to get the user’s precise location. One solution is calibrating with the camera when GPS or beacons lose accuracy. When Guidelight loses location accuracy, it prompts the user to calibrate their location by rotating their phone to let the camera pick up visual features like signage and match them to the building layout. Once enough data is collected, the screen confirms the location and the user returns to navigation.
Once the user has arrived at their destination, they can to rate how efficient and safe they thought the route was. Users can also submit a suggested route if you happen to know a better one that's still accessible, which can be edited either by tweaking the existing directions or deleting them, or by adding coordinates with instructions on a map view.
Everyone has different mobility needs and preferences, and Guidelight's preferences screen takes that into account. You can set a wheelchair type, or other kinds of mobility impairments, and the app tailors routes based on that. For example, if you use a powered wheelchair, there's paths that may be more efficient that you could safely go through, but a person using a manual wheelchair might not be able to because the slope is too high.
Guidelight depends heavily on having access to accurate interior data, something that is rarely publicly available. Our solution to getting indoor data is Guidelight Studio, a platform for stores, malls, institutions, airports, and more to upload and tag their floorplans. It allows them to set up what kinds of navigation to use, from GPS to various kinds of beacons (wifi, bluetooth, and ultra-wideband) that many places are already using for their proprietary solutions. Additionally, Guidelight Studio allows companies to customize the color palettes of their maps - for example they can set the route path to a brand color, and they can add their own icons for things like aisles in a store or logos in a mall.
We couldn't access indoor data for our live demo app, which we built using MapKit, mostly to help visualize how the route following experience would work. It's fairly limited, but the preparation for the demo also helped us figure out how the instructions should be worded and at what coordinates they should appear at, both for the final app and the other screens.
