Guides

• Overview
• Seeing the list of all your guides
• Creating a new digital guide
• Adding custom pages to your guide
• Password protection for your guides
• Editing your guides

Overview

The ability to generate and mange Digital Guides for engaging with visitors and tourists is a core part of the Infopoint platform. Infopoint Digital Guides are online mini-sites designed to present visitors with information about your exhibits or the landmarks that you manage, in multiple languages and supporting rich multimedia.

Each digital guide generated through the Infopoint platform is accessible online through a unique URL. This allows digital guides to be used in multiple different ways to reach out to your audience:

• Set up Infopoints in key locations, either indoors within an institution such as a museum, or outdoors within a city, that allow individuals to reach the digital guide by interacting with their mobile phone.
• Set up tablets kiosks within the premises of an institution, tuned to the digital guide and presenting visitors with details of the exhibits around them.
• Hand out tablets or other internet-enabled devices from your reception, as a replacement for traditional audio guide solutions.
• Link to your guide from your website, social media accounts, emails, or any other communication channel that you utilize.

Seeing the list of all your guides

To see your list of guides, click on the 'Guides' option from the top navigation bar. A list of all digital guides you have created will appear as a table on the page.

Creating a new digital guide.

To create a new guide, click the 'Create' button at the top left of the guides list screen. This will navigate you to a wizard containing the relevant options for managing the behavior, look, and feel of your new digital guide. The 'New Guide' screen is divided into a Basic Details section at the top of the page, and 5 tabs

Basic details: At the top of the 'New Guide' page, you will find the options that define the basic details of the guide.

• Make available: Turn this switch to the 'On' position to make the guide available. If this is in the 'Off' position, visitors navigating to the guide URL will instead receive a 'Guide not found' message. This option allows you to create and make changes to your guide, before making it publically available.
• Internal nickname: The internal nickname, is a name that you can give to your guide to help you easily identify it in the list of guides associated with your team. This name is only shown to platform administrators and never to any individuals viewing the public pages of the digital guide
• Name of the guide: This is the guide name, as it will appear to individuals accessing the public pages of the guide. This name can appear at the top left position of the guide (unless you select to show a logo in that position instead). This is a translateable value, meaning that if you have chosen to support multiple languages with your team, you will see a two letter indicator at the right hand side of this field, which when clicked on allows you to switch to a different language version of this value.
• Password protect access to the guide: Turn this switch on if you would like visitors to have to enter a password first in order to access the guide pages.
• Guide password: If you have selected to password protect your guide, you can define the guide password here.

Languages tab: If you have chosen to associate multiple languages with your team, you can also allow visitors to your guides to have the option to view the guide content in different languages. From the languages tab, you can click the 'Add Languages' button to select the languages you want to make the guide available in.

Items tab: In the Items tab, you can select to associate records from your Database with the guide. For each record that you associate with the guide, an individual page in the guide will be generated to showcase that record.

For example, if you are a museum with 1000 exhibits, and you have recorded the details of those 1000 exhibits in your Infopoint database - you can create a digital guide and select 100 of those exhibits to include in the Guide. Your new digital guide will have 100 pages, with each page showcasing the details of the specific exhibit, including any audiovisual content you associated with that item when you added it to your database. Individuals visiting your digital guide will be able to browse and search through these pages.

This automatic generation of multi-lingual, multimedia rich pages to showcase the details of individual records from your database, whether those records correspond to your exhibits, to landmarks under your care, or any other piece of information, is at the core of the digital guide.

Labels tab: Digital guides generated through the Infopoint platform all have a basic common user interface. All guides for example have an interface for searching through the guide pages, for switching languages, for accessing Maps associated with the guide, etc. This user interface includes certain phrases and words that will appear in the guide. The Labels tab allows you to define your own phraseology to override the default values used in the guide.

Click on the 'Labels' tab, then on the button 'Add New Item'. This will then present you with an interface for overriding all standard common words and phrases used for the interface of the Digital Guide. This is a translateable value, meaning that if you have chosen to support multiple languages with your team, you will see a two letter indicator at the right hand side of this field, which when clicked on allows you to switch to a different language version of this value.

Style tab: The style tab provides you with options for controlling the look and feel of the digital guide. The options available are:

• Show a logo at the top of the guide, instead of the guide name: Each guide includes a bar at the top of the guide window that shocases the 'name' that you have selected to give to your guide. You can select to show a logo instead by clicking on the checkbox here.
• Select image to use as logo: If you have selected to show a logo at the top of the guide instead of the guide name, click here to select an image from your Media Library to use as the logo.
• Use alternate Design for item details pages: Each item from your database that you have selected to include in the guide will have a dedicated page generated for it in the guide. There are two different standard designs for this page, which basically change how the item description and the item 'Additional Sections' value are showcased in the page. You can test both designs by switching this checkbox on and off and seeing how this affects the design of a guide page.
• Show a language switcher in the top guide navbar in place of a search field: By default, at the top right hand corner of a guide, there will be a 'Search' field, allowing visitors to the guide to search through the various guide pages. This option allows you to change that and show a language switcher in place of a search field at that position.
• Show a Related Pages section in each detailed item page, with links to associated Related Items: When you define records for your database, you can define a 'Related Items' property for each record. If you select to associate an item from your database with 'Related Items' defined these 'Related Items' will be shown in the page of the guide in a section name 'Related Items', with links to the guide page for each of these.
• If available, include copyright statement with description of any photographs shown in the guide:Your guide will typically feature and showcase photographs from your Media Library within its various pages. By enabling this option, you will include the copyright statement you nay have defined for this photograph when adding it to your Media Library, in the photograph's description as shown within the guide.
• Color options:There are finally a number of options and controls for changing and defining the colors to use in the guide.


Maps tab: If you have defined any 'Maps' in the Infopoint platform, and have also defined the position of items and landmarks within your database on those maps, you can choose to include those Maps within your guides.

When the guide is rendered, an option to access 'Maps' will be shown to visitors, who will then be able to navigate to any of the Maps you have associated with the guide, in order to see the position of items on that map. This can be ideal for helping users navigate through a city or an indoor space.



Adding custom pages to your guides

As examined, when you create your digital guide, you can select items from your database to associate with the guide. These will then be rendered as pages in the guide, with each page showcasing the details of each item.

Aside from these 'Item pages', you can also include additional pages in your guide that can have a different design and functionality, and are not strictly devoted to showcasing the details of an item from your database of records. To do this, click on 'Guides' from the top navigation bar, then on the 'Additional custom guide pages' option from the left bar sidebar.

There are multiple 'types' of custom pages that you can create. Custom pages are defined individually, and then assocated with a specific guide. To create a custom page and associate it with a guide, follow these steps:

• Click the Guides option from the top navigation bar, then on the 'Additional custom guide pages' from the left hand sidebar

• Click the 'Create...' button at the top left of this new page. This opens up a dropdown menu that shows the 'types' of additional pages that you can select. As of now, the types of pages you can create are:
  • Photowall navigation page: A photowall navigation page contains links to other pages within a guide. When creating a page of this type, you can select a number of 'related items' and 'related pages'. For every item or page selected, a link will be generated in the form of a 'photo' in a photowall, using the primary picture associated with the item of photo. When a user of the guide views the page, they will be able to select any photo on the photowall, which will initially open up a small window presenting the basic description associated with the item or page. They will then be able to select from a link to navigate to the relevant page.
  • Item group page: An Item group page contains details about multiple items on a single page. When creating a page of this type, you can select a number of 'related items'. For every item selected, a different subsection will be generated in the page, presenting details about that item. When a user of the guide views the page, they will be able to view the details of each item in a separate 'tab' and able to navigate between each item's details.
  • An 'Embedded content' page contains content embedded from any external site in the form of an iframe. When creating a page of this type, you will be able to define the iframe code of the content that you want to embed in the page. You will also be asked whether you want to show the page title, the page description, and whether you want the embedded content to stretch all the way to the edges of the screen or not.
• Depending on the type of page you have selected to create, you will see a different set of options and values to define in the following 'New page' screen, as well as a field to define the 'Guide this page belongs to'. Complete the required fields in this page, and select the guide to include the page in, then click the 'Create and Close' button.

Password protection for your guides

We examined how you can password protect your guides and select a master password for the guide in your overall guide settings. However, rather than having a single password to control access to your guide, you may want to issue visitors to your space with one-time, one-use passwords.

For example, if you are a museum and have deployed Infopoints in your space, you may want to give each visitor a one-time password that allows that visitor to interact with the Infopoints through their phone to access the guide once, but does not allow them to share the password with other visitors.

This can be easily done in the one-time passwords interface. Click on 'Guides' from the top navigation bar, then on 'Passwords' from the left hand sidebar. From here, click on 'Create' at the top left of the screen to automatically create a new one-time password.

You can hand this password out to a visitor, to allow them one-time access to any password-protected guide. Visitors can use these passwords on a single device (i.e. their mobile phone) to unlock and get access to your guide, but cannot share the password with other visitors.

Editing your guides

To edit the details of any already existing guide, simply click on the guide name from the list of guides, make any changes in the edit screen that opens up, and click the Save and close button.