Reach your destination quickly and easily, without knowing the address

Each function, as well as the app as a whole, was created as a clever way of answering the following question: how do I make sure I am in the right place at the right time?

The app guided the user to their final destination using personalised notifications sent in real-time. The way the user experience is structured made it easy to find the different YOG competition sites as well as other places of interest without knowing the address.

But why reinvent an app that already exists?

The YOG took place over two weeks. Google, for example, does not update its points of interest (POI) for such a short period of time. Furthermore, the POI created for the YOG are not found at the usual stops.

Developing the app required creative technical solutions because of three particular challenges:

• Incorporating multiple means of transport for a single journey, for example using a bike, bus and train for one journey;
• Combining public and private transport for athletes and officials; and
• Having a way to calculate the carbon footprint produced.

The app offers you the option to choose your itinerary based on the carbon footprint it would produce. This calculation was made possible by technology from RouteRANK.

A bold approach rewarded by exceptional performance

Thanks to Guide Me Yodli, more than 80% of athletes exclusively used public transport when travelling between the Olympic Village and the different competition sites. A first in the history of the Youth Olympic Games!

Although the app was developed from scratch, there were no teething problems to worry about: 96.2% of the users said that it did not crash once while they were using it. And this despite it handling more than 78,000 itinerary searches and more than 10,000 navigation notifications within just ten days.

What's next?

We created the app to adapt to the user and optimised it, to the needs of the athletes and visitors in particular. This user-profile-based approach is applicable to large sporting events of all kinds. It could therefore also be extended or used for other games.