Rebooting the campus map

We launched the first version of the interactive campus map back in 2012, and though we’ve made lots of improvements to it over the years, we felt it was time to give it a complete overhaul.

The new map

You can view the new map at www.york.ac.uk/map

We’ve introduced a number of new features, including:

Larger map

The map is now the full width of the screen. When you open the map, it’s focused on Campus East and Campus West. You can drag the map to move it around, or use the buttons on the right to centre in on Campus East, Campus West or King’s Manor.

The new map

Navigation by search and buttons

Whereas before you could only search for room codes, the new search allows you to find a range of locations, including buildings, departments and rooms, and facilities such as baby changing and car parks. Start typing a location, and then select from the dropdown list of closest matches.

Across the bottom of the screen are buttons for facilities, allowing you to see car parks, cafes, post boxes and so on at a glance. The buttons let you view more than one location at the same time. So, for example, you can search for a building and then locate the car parks that are nearby. You can also have multiple buttons selected at once, should you wish to view shops and cash machines at the same time.

We chose the button types by asking 25 volunteers to pick the facilities that they’d most like to see feature prominently on the campus map. We also took into account that some important facilities may not feature highly, such as baby changing facilities and prayer rooms, and we made sure they can be found via the search instead.

One area we were particularly keen to improve was car parking. All car parks are now displayed on the map, rather than just pay & display and short stay, and we’ve added in additional information such as number of spaces, and RingGo location numbers.

Mobile friendly

Mobile view

The new map has been designed to work on tablets and phones, making it easier to find the places you need when you’re out and about.

You’ll notice you can still access the facilities buttons, but they’re hidden at the bottom of the screen until you need them.

Future improvements

There are still a number of areas that we’re keen to work on:

• Walking and cycling directions between two points on the map
• Expanding the transport information to include bike racks, bike pumps, and perhaps live bus data
• At the moment, the room locations include directions to the room, but we’re only able to drop the pin on the building, rather than the exact location. We’re keen to be able to include more detailed room data using the precise coordinates.

Please take a look at the map, and feel free to leave any feedback either here, or using the feedback button on the map.

Our new search engine

You may have noticed that searching on the University website has become a lot better recently. This is down to the fact that we launched our new search engine this week, replacing our old Google Mini solution with Funnelback.

What's new?

While we've kept the design of the search mostly the same as it was before, a lot has changed behind the scenes that means that search results should be more relevant and come back a lot quicker. The new search is a lot better at dealing with misspellings - of which we see a lot in our search logs, especially when it comes to words like 'accommodation', which is spelled incorrectly as many times as it's spelled correctly. 

A couple of our favourite new features include:

Autocomplete

As soon as you start typing your query you'll see suggestions for searches that match content on our site.

This currently is only enabled for searches carried out from york.ac.uk/search, but we'll soon be adding it to search boxes on the rest of the site too.

Document type filtering

If you know that you're looking for a file of a particular type, the document filter on the right hand side will allow you to narrow down your search.