2024 in Design at Living Map
2024 has been such a transformative year for the design team at Living Map, and I’m thrilled to share with you some of the key highlights. Let’s take a look at what we’ve achieved and some of the exciting things on the horizon for 2025!
Introducing Hippo.
A major milestone going into 2024 has been the rollout of our new design system, Hippo, setting the stage for consistent, scalable design across all our products.
What is Hippo?
- Consistency at scale: Hippo ensures a unified tone of voice, colours, typography, icons, and reusable components, such as buttons, across our products, ensuring a cohesive user experience.
- Ease of updates: Changes can be made at the source and cascaded throughout all products seamlessly.
- Streamlined development: By providing a unified framework, Hippo reduces complexity in builds and design implementation, making workflows more efficient and scalable, reducing development overheads.
Why Hippo?
The name “Hippo” is inspired by the hippocampus, a part of the brain responsible for navigation and wayfinding.
Just as our maps help our users to orient themselves in physical spaces, Hippo provides a strong, structural foundation across our products, guiding users through a consistent and intuitive experience as they navigate our platform.
Refreshed MMS.
The MMS (Map Management System) empowers clients to manage and edit their map features and content, with ongoing updates continuing to enhance capabilities and offer even greater control.
This year, the system received a significant UX update built on Hippo components. The refreshed interface enters development this winter, supporting upcoming features and further enhancing the user experience.
Locator.
The launch of Locator introduces one of our clients’ most requested features: live asset tracking and visualisation.
Clients can now easily track, search, and filter assets locally and globally—so if something goes missing, it won’t stay gone for long!
Geolocated Advertising.
Balancing ads with a positive user experience can be tricky, but we’re excited to introduce a new revenue stream through geolocated advertising. By carefully controlling both the placement and frequency of ads, we ensure they remain relevant and unobtrusive, adding value without interrupting the user journey.
Innovation Spotlight: VIPR.
This year, we revolutionised indoor positioning by shifting our focus to the user experience—asking: “What can users see in their environment?”
The result is VIPR (Vertical Initial Position Recognition), an innovative new feature that locates people without relying on sensors or additional hardware.
VIPR leverages a device’s camera to accurately determine floor levels and positions within a building, offering a beacon-free solution to indoor navigation.
VIPR enters development this winter, and will roll out in 2025, marking a significant step forward in providing innovative, cutting-edge wayfinding solutions.
Welcome Makenzi!
This year, we welcomed Makenzi to the team. His support has been invaluable in enhancing our design output and managing a busy workload. I’m excited to see what we can achieve together in the year ahead!
Our best ever maps.
We’re proud to share that 2024 saw a record number of new branded stylesheets delivered in a single year—a testament to the trust our clients place in our design expertise and the hard work of our teams. From sales, who brought these opportunities to our door, to the design team, who brought them to life.
The feedback we’ve received confirms that these are some of our most successful and well-received styles to date.
Our expanded team and the time afforded by this growth have been crucial in allowing us to focus on quality and precision. With more hands on deck, we’ve been able to deliver faster, more nuanced designs without sacrificing the attention to detail that our clients have come to expect.
Looking Ahead to 2025…
As we look to 2025, the design team will continue to innovate and push boundaries, leading the way in shaping extraordinary products and delivering outstanding user experiences.
Wayfinding kiosks
Having aligned our kiosk product with the functionality of our mobile and desktop platforms, we’ll continue to set new industry benchmarks for digital wayfinding kiosks—leveraging the technology at our fingertips to transform and enhance the wayfinding experience.
Hippo
The continued rollout of Hippo will elevate theming with full light and dark mode support, introduce tighter QA processes, and ensure perfect harmony between design and development.
Routing
Building on the data team’s groundwork, routing will be transformed with turn-by-turn and contextual instructions, providing a more intuitive navigation experience.
Locator
New features, including asset tracking history and heat maps, will continue to enhance its capabilities, providing clearer insights and improved visualisation.
MMS
Updates will introduce new features for managing geolocated adverts, 360° imagery, and user permissions, including approver roles, giving clients greater control over updates.
We hope you're as excited as we are for 2025!
Interested to learn more? Get in touch below.
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Experience the power of our mapping, wayfinding, and navigation technology for yourself. See how our software can enhance the customer experience in your facility.
