Self-guided tours are a way to engage on-site visitors, providing them with step-by-step directions to navigate between scenes on your tour. Any Circuit tour can be enabled as a self-guided tour so long as you have the Circuit Maps feature in your license plan and your tour content is designed with in-person exploration in mind.
Planning a Self-Guided Tour
Identify the scenes that you’d like to include in your self-guided tour, and think about the order that makes sense to visit them as an in-person visitor. Below are some best practices that we recommend:
Make it a circuit! We recommend planning your self-guided tours in a way that visitors can start the tour at any point along the route. This allows you to direct visitors to the self-guided tour at the locations present on the tour without having to first send visitors to a single starting point.
Plan your tour stops such that the last scene and first scene are close to each other, just like you would for other adjacent scenes.
Self-guided mode is currently best suited for tours where walking paths are publicly mapped and directions between scenes follow an outdoor path.
Self-guided tours can contain a maximum of 24 scenes.
We recommend keeping the total self-guided duration for your visitors to around 45 minutes.
Building a Self-Guided Tour
In your CMS, you'll start building a self-guided tour in the same way that you would typically create a new tour.
Upon adding your tour stops, for a self-guided tour, it is essential to first confirm that all scenes are mapped. You may wish to do so as part of planning your tour stops, since having them mapped will also help you visualize the order of tour stops that makes the most sense. The location of your scenes will be used to automatically generate walking directions and the overall tour route.
To Enable self-guided mode with your tour:
Navigate to the Settings tab within your tour.
Scroll down until you see the Self-Guided field.
Click the checkbox.
You will now need to click Save Draft to save your changes or Publish to set this new tour live.
To Preview self-guided mode for your tour:
Ensure location permissions are enabled on your browser.
Click the Preview icon to open up the preview window for your tour.
Click the mobile device icon.
The tour should now load with the self-guided tutorial. Click Take a self-guided tour to review.
Note: In tour previews, the self-guided tour duration and length may take a few extra seconds to load, as directions are requested in real time. In your published tour, these details will load immediately.
Reviewing a Self-Guided Tour
Your visitors will use this experience on-site, so you should too. Sometimes an in-person review will reveal obstacles like temporary construction or gated pathways, or generate ideas about changes to scenes or scene order.
If you run into an issue where the calculated route is impassable, please contact support@madewithcircuit.com to review the map data used to calculate the route.
💡 Need more help?
Send us a message and we will be happy to assist you.