Chapter 14 · Finding your way inside
Wayfinding and orientation
People who cannot find their way arrive late and in a bad mood. How digital wayfinding is built, where it beats a sign and where the sign wins.
In the foyer of a cantonal hospital I helped a woman who had walked past the same screen three times. It showed a handsome plan of the building, in colour, every floor – except that she was not on it. No dot saying: you are here. She was looking for dermatology, found a floor plan and went back to reception. Wayfinding rarely fails because of the technology. It fails because somebody drew a plan instead of answering a question.
The rules of wayfinding
People do not read a building, they make decisions. At the entrance: left or right. At the lift: which floor. Out of the lift: which corridor. Wayfinding means standing at exactly those points and answering exactly the question that arises there — not earlier, not later, and not all at once.
Five rules carry any installation, whether made of sheet metal or glass:
- Decision points first: every junction gets an answer, and in between there may be quiet.
- Respect the line of sight: the screen hangs where the eye falls anyway while walking, before the turn-off and not after it.
- Order destinations by hierarchy: wing and floor first, then department, then room. Nobody reads more than seven destinations on one level.
- One word for one destination: if reception says "Radiology", the screen must not show "Imaging".
- Pictograms as an anchor, text as proof: the eye finds the symbol, the word confirms it.
The most common mistake is the beautiful map. A floor plan without a you-are-here point, without alignment to the direction of travel and without a drawn route is a drawing for architects, not help for visitors.
Screen or sign
In operation, a sign is unbeatably frugal: no power, no network, no maintenance. A screen earns its place only where the information changes. That distinction saves devices in every project, and we regularly argue for it against the client's first wish.
Arguments for the screen:
- changing occupancy of halls, meeting rooms and training rooms
- events with date, time and room
- consultation hours and attendance times that look different every day
- building work, moves and diversions inside the building
- several languages that take turns instead of standing side by side
Stick with the sign for everything permanent that has to work when in doubt. Emergency exits and escape routes belong on illuminated rescue signs and never on a surface that can fail. The same goes for toilets, stairwells, the floor number in the lift, door numbers and everything in rooms without a power supply.
The rule of thumb: what does not change within a year gets written. What changes within a week gets displayed.
Touch kiosk: more than a big screen
As soon as visitors may search for themselves, a display becomes a device that is operated. With that come questions that play no part in a display-only screen.
Operating height first. Controls belong in a zone that seated and standing people can reach — roughly 85 to 120 centimetres above the floor, with the most important buttons in the lower third of the picture. A portrait-format kiosk that carries its menu at the top is unusable from a wheelchair.
Then the search. An on-screen keyboard with suggestions from the second letter onwards finds "Müller" and "Mueller", "ENT" and "ear, nose and throat". Alphabetical directories only help those who already know the name.
The result is not the room number but the route: a map with a you-are-here point, a drawn line, a change of floor as a step of its own, plus the walking time. Anyone who wants to take the route with them gets it on their phone via a QR code; a printer in the foyer is the second option, but it demands paper, servicing and someone to refill it.
Settle hygiene and cleaning beforehand: a front pane, daily cleaning written into the cleaning schedule, and a device that returns to the home page by itself after two minutes of inactivity.
Five buildings, five tasks
The same technology solves a different task in every building. In the municipal offices it is about counters and opening hours, in the hospital about arriving calmly, at a trade fair about speed.
| Place | Task | Content | Update |
|---|---|---|---|
| Municipal offices, entrance | find the counter | departments, floor, opening hours, meetings | daily from the calendar |
| Hospital, foyer | arrive without having to ask | clinics, consultation hours, route to the lift | hourly from the directory |
| Medical centre, waiting area | calling and running order | practices, waiting number, delay | in real time |
| School, hall | rooms and cover lessons | timetable, room changes, events | in the morning and on every change |
| Trade fair, hall entrance | choose a route quickly | stands, hall plan, programme | twice a day |
| Office building, lift | place the tenants | companies, floor, reception hours | whenever a tenant changes |
In a hospital, one extra thought is worth it: whoever is standing there is rarely relaxed. Large type, little movement, no advertising beside the route to oncology. At a trade fair the opposite applies — there speed and overview count, and a hall plan may be large and colourful.
Where the data comes from and who maintains it
Wayfinding is only as good as the directory behind it, and directories go out of date quietly. That is why, before installation, we establish which system holds the truth — and we do so for each item separately.
The usual sources:
- room and occupancy planning for halls, training rooms and meeting rooms
- departmental calendars for events and consultation hours
- the staff directory or internal phone book for names and rooms
- the tenant register held by the management for companies and floors
- the school's timetable software for rooms and cover lessons
Direction matters: data flows from the leading system to the screen, never the other way round and never maintained twice. As soon as someone keeps a list up to date in the signage software that already exists elsewhere, decay is guaranteed.
To that belongs a name on the organisation chart. Who enters the new tenant, who reports a department's move, who checks each quarter whether signs and screens still say the same thing? And define what appears when a source falls silent: the last valid list with a timestamp, not an error message. The chapter on software and operation goes into more detail.
Taking accessibility seriously
For people with a disability, orientation is not a comfort but the precondition for arriving at all. The Disability Equality Act requires publicly accessible buildings to make services reachable without outside help. Wayfinding is part of that.
What that means in practice:
- contrast: light text on a dark ground, no grey on grey, no type over restless images
- type size according to reading distance, judged from three metres and not at the desk
- operating height and enough space in front of the kiosk for a wheelchair to come close
- a read-aloud function or a headphone socket wherever the installation gives information
- plain language: short sentences, no officialese, one term per destination
- no flashing, no rapid changes, enough dwell time per page
- subtitles on videos, since the sound in a foyer is rarely on anyway
If you only want to check one thing: stand three metres away with your back to the screen, turn round and count how long it takes you to find your destination. Anything over five seconds is too complicated. For type sizes and contrasts in detail, the chapter on content takes it further.
Emergencies and safety
In an incident, every surface in the building becomes the surface everyone looks at. That is an opportunity: through the signage software an evacuation page can be pushed to all devices within seconds — a floor plan with the assembly point, a notice in several languages, calm instead of rumour.
The trap lies right beside it. A digital signage installation is not a safety system. Emergency exit luminaires, escape route markings, fire detection and voice alarm follow the cantonal fire safety regulations and run on their own power supply. Your screen may supplement these systems, never replace them: it depends on a network that will be switched off in an emergency.
In practice that means:
- the emergency page as a prepared template, not designed during the incident
- triggering from a defined position, with authorisation and a log
- coupling to the fire detection system only through a potential-free contact and in agreement with the fire safety authority
- a clear rule about who takes the display back down
- one test a year, together with the evacuation drill
Discuss this with the building's safety officer before you set it up. That half-hour saves an awkward discussion later on.
Key pointWayfinding answers exactly one question at every junction – the screen shows what changes, the sign shows what stays.