LNER: indoor wayfinding for visually impaired travellers, proved at Newcastle Station
With an innovation grant, 4 Roads and LNER built phone wayfinding guiding visually impaired travellers through Newcastle Station, where GPS can't reach.
What we do
Apps and innovation
4 Roads builds mobile apps, augmented reality and what nobody has built before: from Hitachi Vantara's BIMA-winning AR display to wayfinding for LNER.
What it is
Native apps, augmented reality, and what nobody has built before.
Some projects are not a website or a community: a native app, an augmented reality experience, or something nobody has built before. Our team designs and builds them, from the first plan to the release.
Augmented reality
What can augmented reality do for a brand?
Augmented reality puts a layer of information over the real world, through a phone, a tablet or glasses. Most people already carry a device that can show it: their phone.
- Engagement: an experience people remember, with a product in their own space rather than on a shop floor
- Less uncertainty: customers see how something fits before they buy it
- A showroom with no walls: every option and configuration, without stocking them
- Explaining the complex: a product's benefits shown, not described
What we have done
Apps and research, with results.
- Hitachi Vantara: a configurator that let delegates build its hardware racks at its conference, which won a BIMA award in 2019, then Project Sight, augmented reality that showed a rack's performance metrics, on stage at Hitachi NEXT 2019
- Gates Ventures: a native iOS and Android app for its Verint community, with interactions up 25% in its first three months and replies 30% faster
- LNER: with an innovation grant, phone wayfinding for visually impaired travellers, proved at Newcastle Station, where GPS can't reach
- Thermomix: an app for its Verint community, launched on Android and iOS in 2020 and downloaded by 99% of the community's original active members
How we work
Discover, demonstrate, design, develop.
- Discover: what it could do for you, and what to expect from us
- Demonstrate: a demo in your brand, so you see it working before you commit
- Design: our UX team designs it around your customers and your business
- Develop: we build it in sprints, so you see it take shape and can change course
The work
Gates Ventures: a community app that lifted interactions 25% in three months
4 Roads built Gates Ventures' Verint community a mostly native iOS and Android app: interactions up 25% in its first three months, and replies 30% faster.
Bradley Dyer: the technical partner behind an experiential agency's ideas
4 Roads is Bradley Dyer's technical partner: what is possible and what it costs, then the build, from a Teen Titans vote to Disney's birthday message wall.
Call 4 Help: an app built in six weeks to get NHS hospital staff help where it was needed
In 2020, 4 Roads and three other firms put paid work aside to build Call 4 Help in six weeks: an app that sent NHS hospital staff help where it was needed.
Have a project in mind?
We would like to hear about it.
Speak to Rob (we can't promise he won't be on his bike)
What else we do
Intelligent self-service
4 Roads builds intelligent self-service: a community, a knowledge base, a virtual assistant and voice, joined up so customers can help themselves.
Online communities
4 Roads has built, migrated and grown online communities since 2007: over 150 of them, for brands, charities and professional bodies.
Web, mobile and CMS
4 Roads builds websites, web apps and the content systems behind them, from strategy and UX to migration, for AMBA, Natural World Safaris and Acticare.