The Spaceagency Guide to Wayfinding
Foreword In the software business, user experience (UX) can make or break a company, and user experience is driven by design. Companies with good user experience design are reported to have over 30% profits against similar competitors and bad UX design has been estimated to be responsible for over $3 billion USD in lost revenue for telephone companies, more than $1 billion for hotels, $262 million for insurers, and $227 million for retailers annually. Take the example of Amazon.com. Their “1-Click purchase” button alone is estimated to be worth over $2.4 billion US dollars. It has been protected by copyright since 1997 and Apple pays them an undisclosed amount every year to use their approach in the App Store. But why? The 1-Click button reduces the number of steps required to make a purchase,
slashing the time and complexity required to create a frictionless shopping experience. Why should all this matter for architects and urban designers? Navigation, like shopping, is fundamentally a user experience problem. How can I find the entrance to the building? How do I get from my car to the lobby? Where is the check-out stand? Where are the lifts and how can I get to the toilet? Wayfinding and user experience design have a fundamental impact on these questions and more. This, in turn, has a fundamental impact on the success of any building project, large or small. Spaceagency’s approach to wayfinding, at all scales, reflects a deep understanding of how human beings understand and perceive the world. Based on the
pioneering work of Bill Hillier and Space Syntax, their approach demonstrates a commanding mixture of cognitive science, human visual perception, and aesthetic expression. Their work unlocks the secrets of how we navigate the world, and by implication, how we should design spaces that help people better orient themselves, better fulfill their needs, and more fully enjoy the world around them. This understanding has profound implications. All too often, architects and designers create buildings in plan, based on formal economic or aesthetic principles, without a proper understanding of how people will actually perceive them. The result is spaces that are hard to understand, hard to navigate, and hard to work in. In addition to being uncomfortable, these tiny moments of confusion multiply over millions of
interactions, creating real friction and costing real money. Like Amazon, designers that truly care about their work should seek to create environments that are not only beautiful, but also legible and therefore more likely to be successful at fulfilling their goals. Spaceagency has mastered the art of urban user interface design. This volume shares their principles and techniques so that you can begin to master it, too. It is no mistake that, like their work, this book is arranged in a way that is both highly legible and aesthetically pleasing. I have no doubt that it will be a source of learning and enjoyment for students, practitioners and theorists alike. With legibility comes beauty, and all those who seek to design projects that not only work, but work well, will find this an essential volume.
Dr. Noah Raford is the Chief Operating Officer and Futurist-in-Chief of the Dubai Future Foundation and a former advisor on futures, foresight, and innovation at the UAE Prime Minister’s Office. Prior to his work in government, Noah was a senior manager at the strategy consultancy Monitor / GBN, CEO of the technology foresight company Futurescaper LLC, North American Director of the urban planning firm Space Syntax Limited, and the Senior Research Advisor to Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. Noah completed his PhD in urban planning and public policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), his master’s degree at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and his undergraduate degree at Brown University.
Dr. Noah Raford Dubai, 2017
iv
v
The Spaceagency Guide to Wayfinding
Foreword In the software business, user experience (UX) can make or break a company, and user experience is driven by design. Companies with good user experience design are reported to have over 30% profits against similar competitors and bad UX design has been estimated to be responsible for over $3 billion USD in lost revenue for telephone companies, more than $1 billion for hotels, $262 million for insurers, and $227 million for retailers annually. Take the example of Amazon.com. Their “1-Click purchase” button alone is estimated to be worth over $2.4 billion US dollars. It has been protected by copyright since 1997 and Apple pays them an undisclosed amount every year to use their approach in the App Store. But why? The 1-Click button reduces the number of steps required to make a purchase,
slashing the time and complexity required to create a frictionless shopping experience. Why should all this matter for architects and urban designers? Navigation, like shopping, is fundamentally a user experience problem. How can I find the entrance to the building? How do I get from my car to the lobby? Where is the check-out stand? Where are the lifts and how can I get to the toilet? Wayfinding and user experience design have a fundamental impact on these questions and more. This, in turn, has a fundamental impact on the success of any building project, large or small. Spaceagency’s approach to wayfinding, at all scales, reflects a deep understanding of how human beings understand and perceive the world. Based on the
pioneering work of Bill Hillier and Space Syntax, their approach demonstrates a commanding mixture of cognitive science, human visual perception, and aesthetic expression. Their work unlocks the secrets of how we navigate the world, and by implication, how we should design spaces that help people better orient themselves, better fulfill their needs, and more fully enjoy the world around them. This understanding has profound implications. All too often, architects and designers create buildings in plan, based on formal economic or aesthetic principles, without a proper understanding of how people will actually perceive them. The result is spaces that are hard to understand, hard to navigate, and hard to work in. In addition to being uncomfortable, these tiny moments of confusion multiply over millions of
interactions, creating real friction and costing real money. Like Amazon, designers that truly care about their work should seek to create environments that are not only beautiful, but also legible and therefore more likely to be successful at fulfilling their goals. Spaceagency has mastered the art of urban user interface design. This volume shares their principles and techniques so that you can begin to master it, too. It is no mistake that, like their work, this book is arranged in a way that is both highly legible and aesthetically pleasing. I have no doubt that it will be a source of learning and enjoyment for students, practitioners and theorists alike. With legibility comes beauty, and all those who seek to design projects that not only work, but work well, will find this an essential volume.
Dr. Noah Raford is the Chief Operating Officer and Futurist-in-Chief of the Dubai Future Foundation and a former advisor on futures, foresight, and innovation at the UAE Prime Minister’s Office. Prior to his work in government, Noah was a senior manager at the strategy consultancy Monitor / GBN, CEO of the technology foresight company Futurescaper LLC, North American Director of the urban planning firm Space Syntax Limited, and the Senior Research Advisor to Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. Noah completed his PhD in urban planning and public policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), his master’s degree at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and his undergraduate degree at Brown University.
Dr. Noah Raford Dubai, 2017
iv
v
1
The Spaceagency Guide to Wayfinding
Approach
A What is Wayfinding?
B Project Stages
1 C Methodology
D Spaceagency's Aims
Wayfinding is a little known field of design that crosses a number of disciplines, including urban design and planning, product design, graphic design, information design and behavioural psychology. Without any higher education programmes dedicated to the field, wayfinding is often poorly understood. The first chapter of this book aims to provide a context for designers about what wayfinding is, and an overview about how a wayfinding design project can be effectively executed.
E Outline Report Structure
5
1
The Spaceagency Guide to Wayfinding
Approach
A What is Wayfinding?
B Project Stages
1 C Methodology
D Spaceagency's Aims
Wayfinding is a little known field of design that crosses a number of disciplines, including urban design and planning, product design, graphic design, information design and behavioural psychology. Without any higher education programmes dedicated to the field, wayfinding is often poorly understood. The first chapter of this book aims to provide a context for designers about what wayfinding is, and an overview about how a wayfinding design project can be effectively executed.
E Outline Report Structure
5
2
The Spaceagency Guide to Wayfinding
Understanding Space Space lies at the heart of our physical existence. It is the common denominator in everything we do in the physical world. It facilitates communication and interaction in a myriad of different ways. Therefore, how we understand and perceive space is crucial to wayfinding and navigation. Through evolution we have developed a series of strategies of how we navigate through an unknown environment. One of the most common techniques is navigation by landmarks. These can be natural features, such as mountain peaks, rivers, seafronts, and beaches and other. They can be man-made structures like transport nodes, major buildings, street names, train lines, tunnels and others. Strategies for navigation can be highly subjective and can vary dramatically from user to user. Navigating space can be complex and is dependent on a number of interrelated factors that differ from project to project. It is therefore important, at the outset of a wayfinding project, to fully understand the user
groups that will be using the wayfinding system. These factors can be broken down into 5 main topics. The Urban Network In an urban environment, the overall layout of the circulation network has a significant impact on how we navigate space. The two most significant types are the rectangular grid, as epitomised in modernist city planning and evident in many north American Cites, and the 'deformed wheel', which is evident in many older cities where the layout was established before the advent of cars. Additionally, in orthogonal grid-based networks, the directions of the grid may or may not align with the principal cardinal directions. For example, wayfinding for the clear grid and North-South alignment of Manhattan has very different requirements from an organically grown city like London, which is characterised by a more radial network of streets. Understanding these constraints and
working with them is important when devising a wayfinding system. The User The type of user can have a significant impact on how space is perceived. For example a tourist will perceive space in a foreign city differently from a local; a child from an adult; a driver from a pedestrian; and a person with reduced mobility from someone with full mobility. The function or purpose of navigating a space can have a significant impact on how a user navigates. The Space The physical layout and composition of any given space, as constituted by: Edges and perceived or real, physical boundaries like walls, buildings, train tracks, canals, motorways, rivers, shorelines. Boundaries can occur on a series of scales. At the very large, city-wide scale, for instance, it is difficult to imagine London without the River Thames, Manhattan without the East River or the Hudson, and San Francisco without the Bay.
On a much smaller scale, and depending on the type of user, a staircase might be an obstacle. A busy street, certain neighborhood might be perceived as a no-go area, or even seemingly small details, like a kerb on the sidewalk. Depending on the user's point of view and purpose, these can be boundaries and obstacles, or they can be a mean to connect different parts of a given space. Neighbourhoods are a smaller subset of the overall city space, neighbourhoods are areas of a city that can be characterized by geographic boundaries, natural features, a particular and consistent architectural style, particular social and ethnic groups. The Network The network of paths, streets, sidewalks, alleys, canals, train tracks, corridors and other means of connecting different parts of the space. The importance of each linkage in the network is heavily influenced by how connected it is to all the other streets and links in the network. For the user, the special character and activity along
"Through evolution we have developed a series of strategies for navigating an unknown environment." a particular street are important factors and can define the character and mental image of a street. Users tend to prefer straight paths that have a clearly defined beginning and a clearly defined destination. Intersections and junctions of streets are of particular importance, since decisions about onward travel must be made and elements placed at junctions automatically gain importance based on their location. In particular cases, the layout of the street network itself can become so iconic and memorizable that it defines navigation and shapes the mental image of the city. Probably the best examples for this is the orthogonal grid of Manhattan.
The Mode of Transport The mode of travel can have a significant impact on the way a user perceives a space. For example, someone travelling on the underground might have little awareness of the physical space surrounding him at street level. He may not be able to understand how the different underground stations geographically relate to each other above ground, in particular if the belowground paths do not align with major streets above. This hinders his ability to build up a connected mental map of the city over time. By contrast, a user walking, driving, or cycling at street level is likely to gain a more coherent understanding of how the different parts of the city relate and connect to each other. 19
2
The Spaceagency Guide to Wayfinding
Understanding Space Space lies at the heart of our physical existence. It is the common denominator in everything we do in the physical world. It facilitates communication and interaction in a myriad of different ways. Therefore, how we understand and perceive space is crucial to wayfinding and navigation. Through evolution we have developed a series of strategies of how we navigate through an unknown environment. One of the most common techniques is navigation by landmarks. These can be natural features, such as mountain peaks, rivers, seafronts, and beaches and other. They can be man-made structures like transport nodes, major buildings, street names, train lines, tunnels and others. Strategies for navigation can be highly subjective and can vary dramatically from user to user. Navigating space can be complex and is dependent on a number of interrelated factors that differ from project to project. It is therefore important, at the outset of a wayfinding project, to fully understand the user
groups that will be using the wayfinding system. These factors can be broken down into 5 main topics. The Urban Network In an urban environment, the overall layout of the circulation network has a significant impact on how we navigate space. The two most significant types are the rectangular grid, as epitomised in modernist city planning and evident in many north American Cites, and the 'deformed wheel', which is evident in many older cities where the layout was established before the advent of cars. Additionally, in orthogonal grid-based networks, the directions of the grid may or may not align with the principal cardinal directions. For example, wayfinding for the clear grid and North-South alignment of Manhattan has very different requirements from an organically grown city like London, which is characterised by a more radial network of streets. Understanding these constraints and
working with them is important when devising a wayfinding system. The User The type of user can have a significant impact on how space is perceived. For example a tourist will perceive space in a foreign city differently from a local; a child from an adult; a driver from a pedestrian; and a person with reduced mobility from someone with full mobility. The function or purpose of navigating a space can have a significant impact on how a user navigates. The Space The physical layout and composition of any given space, as constituted by: Edges and perceived or real, physical boundaries like walls, buildings, train tracks, canals, motorways, rivers, shorelines. Boundaries can occur on a series of scales. At the very large, city-wide scale, for instance, it is difficult to imagine London without the River Thames, Manhattan without the East River or the Hudson, and San Francisco without the Bay.
On a much smaller scale, and depending on the type of user, a staircase might be an obstacle. A busy street, certain neighborhood might be perceived as a no-go area, or even seemingly small details, like a kerb on the sidewalk. Depending on the user's point of view and purpose, these can be boundaries and obstacles, or they can be a mean to connect different parts of a given space. Neighbourhoods are a smaller subset of the overall city space, neighbourhoods are areas of a city that can be characterized by geographic boundaries, natural features, a particular and consistent architectural style, particular social and ethnic groups. The Network The network of paths, streets, sidewalks, alleys, canals, train tracks, corridors and other means of connecting different parts of the space. The importance of each linkage in the network is heavily influenced by how connected it is to all the other streets and links in the network. For the user, the special character and activity along
"Through evolution we have developed a series of strategies for navigating an unknown environment." a particular street are important factors and can define the character and mental image of a street. Users tend to prefer straight paths that have a clearly defined beginning and a clearly defined destination. Intersections and junctions of streets are of particular importance, since decisions about onward travel must be made and elements placed at junctions automatically gain importance based on their location. In particular cases, the layout of the street network itself can become so iconic and memorizable that it defines navigation and shapes the mental image of the city. Probably the best examples for this is the orthogonal grid of Manhattan.
The Mode of Transport The mode of travel can have a significant impact on the way a user perceives a space. For example, someone travelling on the underground might have little awareness of the physical space surrounding him at street level. He may not be able to understand how the different underground stations geographically relate to each other above ground, in particular if the belowground paths do not align with major streets above. This hinders his ability to build up a connected mental map of the city over time. By contrast, a user walking, driving, or cycling at street level is likely to gain a more coherent understanding of how the different parts of the city relate and connect to each other. 19
Information Strategy THIS EXHIBITION!
Which Exhibition?
THIS Floor!
ID
EXHIBITION ID Floor
EXHIBITION
B
3 Al Rayyan Precinct
Identification Arriving at the exhibition
Which ZONE?
Which Building?
THIS ZONE!
Parking P1-P4
Which Entrance?
THIS BUILDING!
Identification Arriving at the floor
Floor Which Floor?
THIS ENTR ANCE!
Orbital North
Map
ZONE
ID ZONE
Building
ID Building
ID
Entrance
Map
Entrance
Museum
Orientation Information/ Planning
User Journey to Site Information Thresholds 72
Directional Navigation to site
Orientation Site map
User Journey Spaceagency's approach is to envision the journey through the eyes of the visitor. By imagining the questions a visitor has in sequence, it becomes clear which information will be needed to answer their specific questions at each point the user journey. We employ the principle of progressive disclosure of information, so that only as much information as necessary is given at each specific decision point. It is like following a trail of bread crumbs. This avoids overloading the visitor with too much complexity.
Directional Navigation to building
Identification Arriving at the zone
Identification Building ID signage
Directional Navigation within building
Identification Entrance ID
Orientation Building directory
73
Information Strategy THIS EXHIBITION!
Which Exhibition?
THIS Floor!
ID
EXHIBITION ID Floor
EXHIBITION
B
3 Al Rayyan Precinct
Identification Arriving at the exhibition
Which ZONE?
Which Building?
THIS ZONE!
Parking P1-P4
Which Entrance?
THIS BUILDING!
Identification Arriving at the floor
Floor Which Floor?
THIS ENTR ANCE!
Orbital North
Map
ZONE
ID ZONE
Building
ID Building
ID
Entrance
Map
Entrance
Museum
Orientation Information/ Planning
User Journey to Site Information Thresholds 72
Directional Navigation to site
Orientation Site map
User Journey Spaceagency's approach is to envision the journey through the eyes of the visitor. By imagining the questions a visitor has in sequence, it becomes clear which information will be needed to answer their specific questions at each point the user journey. We employ the principle of progressive disclosure of information, so that only as much information as necessary is given at each specific decision point. It is like following a trail of bread crumbs. This avoids overloading the visitor with too much complexity.
Directional Navigation to building
Identification Arriving at the zone
Identification Building ID signage
Directional Navigation within building
Identification Entrance ID
Orientation Building directory
73
155
155
Acknowledgements We would like to thank all the designers and companies who made significant contributions to the compilation of this book. Without them, this project would not have been possible. We would also like to thank many others whose names did not appear on the credits, but made specific input and support for the project from beginning to end.
Future Editions If you would like to contribute to the next edition of Artpower, please email us your details to: press@artpower.com.cn