Prospective students and their families don’t blame the map when they can’t find parking, navigate around construction, or identify an accessible entrance. They blame the institution.
For the teams responsible for the campus experience—facilities, IT, marketing, admissions, parking, accessibility services, athletics, and event operations—wayfinding rarely feels like one job. But to someone standing outside an unfamiliar building trying to determine where to go, it is one connected experience.
The consequences extend beyond inconvenience. In a 2023 campus-wide survey at the University of Michigan, 35% of respondents said they had trouble finding their way through library spaces when they were new to campus. Roughly 30% still experienced difficulty sometimes or often after becoming more familiar with the environment. Respondents with disabilities reported greater difficulty on average, reinforcing that clear navigation is also an accessibility issue.
Confusing wayfinding doesn’t just waste time. It influences how students, families, and visitors feel about the institution as a whole.
Here’s where campus wayfinding commonly breaks down, and what tends to fix it.
Campus Information Is Divided Across Departments
Facilities manages construction and building access. Parking services manages lots and permits. Admissions creates visit-day materials. Athletics and events communicate venue information. Accessibility services maintains accessible-route guidance. IT supports the systems that publish it all.
Nobody intentionally creates a fragmented visitor experience, but that is often the result. Several maps, webpages, PDFs, and event instructions are maintained independently and updated on different schedules.
A visitor may find one parking location in an admissions email, another on the campus map, and a construction closure that appears on neither.
Mount Holyoke College encountered this problem when its event and navigation information lived in disconnected systems. Changes were not always reflected online, sometimes resulting in students arriving at events that had moved or been canceled. By connecting its events calendar and interactive map, the college created a more consistent path from discovering an event to reaching it.
The broader lesson is simple: campus information should come from a shared source that authorized teams can update. Whether someone begins on an admissions page, an event listing, or the main campus map, they should receive the same answer.
Static Maps Can’t Keep Up With Campus Changes
A campus changes constantly. A walkway closes, construction moves an entrance, a parking lot reaches capacity, a building changes name, or commencement reroutes traffic for the weekend.
A PDF map, however carefully designed, stays accurate only until something changes, and with constant change, maintaining a PDF map is arduous.
This was the challenge at Elmira College, where even small map updates required additional design work. The college needed a resource that could adapt to event information, visitor needs, and campus changes without repeatedly redesigning static files. Its communications team can now update locations and create customized map views directly.
A more resilient campus map gives staff the ability to make routine changes without submitting an IT ticket or waiting for an outside vendor. Construction notices, parking information, event locations, accessibility details, and temporary closures can be updated as campus conditions change.
The result is not simply a more attractive map, it is information people can trust.
Accessibility Must Be Part of the Route
A route that works for most people is not a complete wayfinding solution. The CDC estimates that 28.7% of U.S. adults—approximately 70 million people—have some form of disability, with mobility disabilities the most common type. Accessibility is not an edge case to address later. It affects a substantial share of the students, employees, families, and guests already navigating campuses.
Wheelchair users, people with mobility aids, screen-reader users, and visitors pushing strollers need more than a marker showing where a building is. They need accessible parking, step-free routes, appropriate entrances, elevator information, and clear directions from arrival to destination.
Accessible wayfinding also requires details that help people plan before leaving home. Mount Holyoke, for example, is expanding its event information to include accessible entrances and restrooms, sensory considerations, and environmental details that reduce uncertainty for attendees. A pin on a building is not enough if the route to reach it is unusable—or if someone cannot determine that until arriving.
Major Events Expose Everyday Navigation Problems
Move-in, orientation, commencement, homecoming, conferences, performances, and athletic events bring large numbers of unfamiliar visitors to campus at once.
Wayfinding gaps that receive little attention on an ordinary weekday become obvious when hundreds or thousands of people arrive looking for parking, check-in locations, accessible entrances, or a specific venue.
Event-specific map views help by showing only what that audience needs:
- Designated parking
- Road and walkway closures
- Check-in locations
- Venue entrances
- Accessible routes
- Shuttle stops
- Event-specific services
Elmira College uses customized map views to support occasions such as commencement, accepted-student programs, alumni reunions, and Family Weekend. During one accepted-student event, the map helped hundreds of students and family members navigate activities across campus.
These focused maps can be shared before arrival through registration emails, event pages, social media, mobile apps, and QR codes. Visitors can plan ahead, while campus teams spend less time answering the same directional questions.
Event Discovery and Arrival Should Be One Journey
Someone finds a campus tour, lecture, performance, or athletic event online. Their next questions are practical:
Where should I park? Which entrance should I use? How long will the walk take? Is there an accessible route?
If answering those questions requires moving between an event calendar, the university website, a PDF, and a third-party navigation app, the experience is already fragmented.
Connecting event listings directly to relevant map locations closes that gap. The visitor can move from discovering an event to finding parking and following the appropriate route without starting a separate search.
Mount Holyoke took this approach by linking event listings to map locations that show parking and building directions. The college has since reported fewer navigation-related questions and complaints, along with stronger visibility and attendance for events.
That connection matters beyond event operations. It also affects recruitment.
For many prospective students, the campus map is not a minor utility. It is part of their first direct experience with the institution.
More Information Is Not Always More Helpful
A map can be accurate and still be difficult to use.
Displaying every building, office, parking lot, pathway, dining location, construction notice, and transit stop at once does not necessarily create clarity. Often, it creates clutter.
Effective wayfinding begins with the decision a person is trying to make. A prospective student attending a tour, a first-year student finding a classroom, a parent arriving for commencement, and a visiting fan heading to a stadium each need a different, focused view.
They do not need the entire institution compressed onto one screen.
A shared mapping platform can still serve all of these audiences. The key is using categories, filters, and customized views to show each person the information relevant to their visit.
That same approach can extend the map beyond directions. Prospective students can explore academic buildings and residence halls before arriving. Alumni can rediscover meaningful campus locations. Visitors can learn about institutional landmarks and history. Advancement teams can create tours focused on projects or spaces that donors may be interested in supporting.
The map remains practical, but it also becomes part of how the institution tells its story.
Is Your Campus Map Ready?
Consider these questions:
- Can admissions, facilities, parking, accessibility services, athletics, and event teams update one shared map?
- Can an authorized staff member publish a change today if an entrance closes tomorrow?
- Does the map provide genuinely accessible routes, or simply identify accessible destinations?
- Can someone move directly from an event listing to useful arrival information?
- Can teams create focused map views for commencement, move-in, and accepted-student programs?
- Can visitors quickly find what matters to them without navigating through campus-wide clutter?
- If your busiest day of the year happened tomorrow, would the map hold up?
If several of these questions reveal gaps, the problem may not be the campus itself or even its physical signage. It may be the digital systems connecting people to those spaces.
Colleges such as Mount Holyoke and Elmira demonstrate what changes when those connections improve: information becomes easier to maintain, events become easier to attend, and visitors can navigate with greater confidence.
Solving campus wayfinding is ultimately about more than preventing wrong turns. It is about creating an experience that tells every student, family member, employee, and guest that the institution expected them—and planned for their arrival..