Finding your way can be challenging when visiting a new place. Fortunately, wayfinding signs prove to be of immense help in such a situation, ensuring that you can reach your destination without getting lost. Considering the significance of these signs, it is crucial to keep them organised and make it easy to navigate. Here are a few guidelines to follow in order to increase the efficiency of wayfinding signage in your office or building.
Consistency should be maintained across all the signs placed in a building. This is important due to many reasons, such as to enhance the attractiveness of a place, but primarily it instils a feeling of confidence in visitors. Inconsistency in signage commonly occurs when an area or building is revamped. The signage in the renovated area is replaced with new ones, while others are left unchanged. This can not only look unattractive, but can cause confusion among visitors as well. Thus, it is advisable to keep all the signs around a building in the same size and font.
To make navigation easy, colour coding can help considerably. Although it’s not a new technique, but it can be highly effective, if used wisely. Colour coding works by segregating names of different areas with distinct colours. Extensive use of this technique can be seen in the interiors of buildings and parking areas, where it becomes quite convenient for visitors to get directions to an area without having to go through the entire sign.
Keeping the audience in mind is highly important to ensure that the sign serves the purpose it is designed for. This aspect should be considered diligently when installing wayfinding signs in colleges, medical centres, offices etc. For example, in a hospital the environment is generally quite stressful and simple signs are more suited there, instead of the fancy ones. This is because patients and visitors wish to reach their desired area quickly without having to spend time understanding any complicated sign. In short, simplicity is the key if you want to make it a hassle free experience for visitors. While it can be exciting to use different shapes or fonts to make the signs unique, but these should not be so distinctive that people find it hard to process the information, leaving them more confused than before.
Similar to the factor mentioned above, the language used on the signs should be chosen according to the visitors. It is fine to play with the words or use fancy terms in a theme park, but an office should have more professional looking signs. If the area is visited by people of different nationalities and not everyone is familiar with one common language, then it is better to take help of pictures to make the signs easy to comprehend, especially for facilities such as restrooms, stairs, handicapped parking, restricted areas etc.
Designing wayfinding signs can seem quite easy initially, but it is highly complicated, as there are various factors worth considering if you want to assure a positive and hassle free user experience. Meticulously designed and strategically placed wayfinding signage not only ensure convenience, but can be life saving as well in critical situations.