Creating navigability through legibility
Creating navigability through legibility requires close collaboration between different design disciplines on a project
When I was in France a couple of years ago, we visited the local bakery, a large number of beautiful castles, a few cafes and of course, the local supermarket to get our groceries.
My French is not that good (biere, vin & fromage – that’s about it) but I found it quite easy to find my way through this supermarket. The fruit and veggies were near the entrance, followed by the bread and the cold meat. The milk, butter and cheeses were on the back wall in the refrigerated section.
The isles were laid out very similar to the ones in my local Woolworths, with food first followed by a slow introduction of non-food items. Even the cash registers were there where I expected them to be, right near the exit.
A couple of days later, we went to visit an old friend who lives only a few villages away from where we were staying. When I asked him for directions, he said he lived opposite the church. He insisted that those directions would be enough – he was right. As we approached the village, it became clear that we were getting closer to the centre. We then saw a market in the village square and right next to that was the church.
Both instances are good examples of wayfinding without signage. In the wayfinding world, we call it educated seeking. It means to find your way using knowledge built up from previous experiences.
Seeking with purpose
According to the power of educated seeking, you would have found your way to my friend's house too.
From your previous experience of being in cities and smaller towns, you would have innately understood that the church is in the centre of town, often bordering the town square.
At ID-LAB, we often use this thinking in our wayfinding projects. We think about what’s necessary in our wayfinding strategy, and what simply isn’t necessary.
Do we really need a large sign saying ‘Reception’ over the reception desk in a hospital’s atrium? Especially if the reception desk is visible from all directions, and is clearly designed to look like a reception desk, with a receptionist behind it who clearly looks like a receptionist?
If we’re abiding by the logic of educated seeking, our answer would be ‘no’.
Creating legible environments
A legible environment is just that, an environment that the user can read, can understand, can interact with – preferably with minimal signage.
In Greenfield projects, we spend a considerable amount of time and effort working with the architects, interior designers and landscape designers to create an environment that tells the users what they need to know.
At the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre, we recommended adding a dog leg to the airlock which means that visitors now face the reception desk when they walk in
We use a number of thoughtful design strategies to create legibility in our wayfinding.
We work with architects to ensure the user is situated by design to face the reception desk when entering the space. This orientation means the visitor does not need a sign to direct them to reception – it’s already naturally in their path.
We optimise line of sight opportunities. For example, we work with the space to minimise visual obstacles between the user and important landmarks, such as lifts. Where possible within the master plan, we ensure main lifts are visible from the moment the user enters. Similarly, all outpatient clinics are ideally visible from the moment a user exits the lifts, either straight ahead or clearly left or right.
If further direction is needed down a corridor, we help the user connect the journey dots by visually expressing the reception desks of the clinics into the corridor. We differentiate the ceiling, floor and colour treatment to help naturally lead them there.
We lead the user into the entrance through visual cues and the surrounding landscape. Our team works alongside landscape architects to integrate design elements that lead the user to the entrance without the need for unnecessary entrance signage.
At the Royal Adelaide Hospital, the landscape designer re-configured his original plans for the main pedestrian access towards the hospital. Instead of obstructing the entrance, the landscape and architecture should guide the user to the entrance
All of these strategies have something in common: they are only possible if the entire design team works together towards the same goal.
Collaboration is necessary to create legibility
Creating this kind of navigability through legibility requires close collaboration between different design disciplines on a project, especially architects.
We’ve worked with a lot of different architectural teams. The ones that stand out are those who are open to co-creation of the best user experience. In other words, they listen when we say something could be altered to vastly improve the user experience.
Architects must deal with many more things in a project than we do. And more critical stuff too: how do we keep the building from falling over, where do we hide the air conditioning, not to mention the millions of cables everywhere.
At ID-LAB, our focus is solely on how a person navigates, what they observe, respond to, and experience. This focus sometimes makes us come up with different or additional architectural interventions that improve the space's legibility or enhance circulation. Not because we want to take over from the architect (we most certainly do not) but because we just have more time to think about those particular issues.
Almost nothing gives me greater pleasure than creating spaces with beautiful order. Whether the user’s goal is finding the cheese in a foreign supermarket or locating an oncologist's room in a new hospital, the underlying strategy is the same.
That is, to maximise the user’s previous navigational experience, shared understandings of space and using other visual cues, and minimise the need for additional signage.
The user inherently knows the way, it’s our role to gently guide them to it.