What a visitor sees after they scan

Everything else in this section is about drawing the route. This page is what the person holding the phone actually gets, which is worth knowing before you print a sticker or hang a board: it decides what “check it worked” looks like.

The map fills the screen. Everything else floats over it — the building’s name and two round buttons along the top, the level rail down the left, and a dock at the bottom where the thumb is. The dock is the part that changes.

Two codes, two first screens

Both come from Offision, and they behave differently on purpose.

• A standing code — a printed location access key, or the wayfinding QR on a board — carries no destination. The phone opens with the map at the spot the code belongs to, and the dock is a single search field: Where do you want to go?
• A route handed over from a board — someone searched on the board and sent it to their phone — arrives with the room already chosen, so the phone opens on the card described below rather than on the search.

Choosing a room

Results rise behind the search field, which does not move. They are grouped — Your destination if the code named one, This floor, then a group per level — so a name that exists twice in the building is still tellable apart.

Tapping a result flies the map to that room’s own floor and frames it. This is the part people get wrong when they test it: ask for a room two floors up and the map leaves the floor you scanned on, which is correct and looks like a fault if you were expecting to stay put.

Seeing it before walking to it

The card names the room, its level, and either Same floor or how many floor changes the walk needs. No minutes and no metres — Offision does not know how fast anyone walks, and a confident wrong estimate is worse than none.

The room is filled green on the map while every other room stays blue, so the target is the one thing that is not simply “a room”. One wide button: Take me there.

The walk, one step at a time

Take me there returns to the starting floor and hands over one step at a time, with the map reframing itself for each leg:

• Start here, under it Where you scanned.
• Go to Level 2 for each lift or staircase on the way, under it the name of the lift or stairs, or just Lift where it has none.
• The room’s name, under it You have arrived.

Back and Next move between them, and the last step offers Done. There is no step counter and no progress dots: the visitor is walking, and one instruction at a time is the whole idea.

Advancing past a lift step is what changes the floor. The level rail follows along, so a visitor never has to know it is there — which matters, because picking the wrong level by hand is the classic way to get lost in a building you have never been in.

The two round buttons

• Back to start returns the map to the spot they scanned. It is not a GPS crosshair: this page never asks for a location, and touching the map anywhere releases the lock so they can pan away again.
• Switch light or dark is the visitor’s own choice, not the phone’s. A lobby at night and a lobby in full sun want opposite maps, and the operating system’s setting knows about neither.

What it does not do

• No account and no app. The code is the whole of the authentication.
• No live position. The route starts where the code is, not where the person is standing now.
• No time or distance estimate.
• Only the floors the code covers, which are the floors that are drawn and licensed for wayfinding — search offers nothing else. A floor with no route network gives no directions at all; see Wayfinding gives no directions on a floor.
• The link expires. A route sent from a board lasts about half an hour and a standing code a couple of hours, after which the page says This link has expired and asks for a fresh scan. Expired, tampered and unknown codes all give that one message, deliberately.