Wayfinding
London is an organic, spiraling city of nested corners and secret nooks. It can be daunting at times to find your way through the streets, but below the din of the city is a stunning bit of design: The Underground.
I am proud to say I didn’t get lost once in London, not because I am a fantastic navigator, but because of The London Underground’s wonderful wayfinding system. Whether you are buying ticket, descending the stairs, or getting on or off the trains, your entire experience is clearly plotted; you always know where you are, where you are headed, and where all of your possible connections may be made. Systems like that seem like common sense when they are done well, but leave us wandering around filled with confused aggression when they are not.
I’ve had very little exposure to environmental design of this sort, but @media, because it was so heavy on accessibility in design, piqued my interest in color usage in wayfinding systems. The Underground signage and maps use color-coding to distinguish train lines, but how suitable are those for colorblind people? Items color-coded with red, orange, or pink can look similar enough to be confusing; is there potential for colorblind people to get lost? A viewer is usually aided by some sort of text accompaniment in these situations, but text would be directly tied to a language, potentially causing problems for foreign visitors.
Where colors and language might fail, can we provide a backup plan? A possible solution might be to pair colors with patterns, providing a visual fallback method for those folks who have difficulty distinguishing colors. For instance, red could be paired with a checkerboard, orange with slanted lines, and so on. This method could also be helpful in cases where ink might fade and distort similar shades of color, making it difficult even for those who normally can distinguish colors without problems.
Does anyone have experience with or information about designing wayfinding systems, like the kinds found in public transportation hubs, museums, zoos, or parking garages?
- Posted at 1:44 am in Design, Travel
Commentary Closed (28)
What about the blind people? You’d have to have pink stripes, but with a different texture to the red ones so they can pick it up.
For that matter, what about very young, blind children? You might have to add flavours to each color and pattern and texture!
Whilst the public transport wayfinding is indeed excellent (a fascinating bunch of design standards can be found here: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/corporate/media/designstandards/), pedestrian signage is pretty poor (causing the common problem of people using the tube when it’d actually be quicker to walk).
See http://www.legiblelondon.info/
There is a black and white version of the tube map which uses the pattern technique you described.
You can find it on this page under ‘Accessible Tube maps’:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/gettingaround/1108.aspx
I see what you mean about using patterns as well as colours, but in reality I don’t think it would work. One of the greatest things about the London Underground map is manages to create simplicity within chaos (link to pdf of the whole map here).
Placing patterns onto each line would probably make the map more difficult to read for everybody as everything would merge into one from afar (just my opinion of course). I’m actually Red Green colour blind but can’t say it effects me too much. Merely the positioning of the stations is good enough for me. I realise that in some cases each individual line is shown on it’s own at a platform level but the entire map is never far away so that you can see all the stations relatively from one another…
Anyway, luckily for me I now live just down the road from work so I walk in each day! Much nicer than the smelly crowded tube ;-)
Don’t colour blind people just need to know the position of things? Otherwise they’d always be driving through red lights.
Having just been to New York, I wonder why it is that flawless 70-year old design like the tube map doesn’t get universally adopted? There is no need for cramped illegible confusing subway maps.
You didn’t get lost once? But that’s part of the fun! I wouldn’t love London half as much if it wasn’t for the side streets and blind alleys and dead ends.
That accessible tube map is pretty interesting. I hadn’t seen it before although it does seem to require a fair amount of concentration to use it. I might give it a go for the week.
Andy Hume: Thanks for the link! The patterns are great in the context of that map, but to really be accessible, some of the same treatments would need to appear in the stations to remain consistent. Do you think that the patterns break down when someone gets to a station and the signs only include the colors?
Neil Scott:
Sure, but maps are considerably more involved than a three light system. How steep is the learning curve for colorblind people to learn a new system? Colorblind locals would have the advantage of being able to read any text accompanying the colors, but what about a foriegn colorblind visitor?
David Owens: Oh, I definitely got lost above ground. :D
To revisit Frankie’s point above, the downside of our beautifully designed Tube map is that it bares little resemblance to the stations’ actual geographical locations, and this most definitely results in confused travellers taking the Tube - and sometimes even changing lines - instead of a brief 2 minute walk. And, of course, the opposite is true as well!
With that in mind, you may find this geographically correct map rather intersting. :)
This is true, but also reminds me of the reason I liked New York: there is minimal effort to cater for tourists (no signs for museums etc), which makes it more authentic and interesting, not like the kind of deadening kitsch of museumy Venice or the twee parts of London.
Neil Scott: Haha, I like the “go away” approach to tourism. “Your money’s no good here.”
Why, that would be the universal retardant for all progress in the U.S.—politics! You see, city planners, designers, perhaps engineers all want to have a say in how projects like that go. In Britain, it’s not a democracy, so you get one person who knows what the hell they’re talking about, slap some Futura on a sign, and BOOM—you’re done. No discussion, no arguement!
I’m kidding of course, but I do believe that politics and the worry over accountability tends to act as a stumbling block for positive, usable, design-based solutions in our public works projects… I doubt the U.S. will ever realize a public appreciation for design on par with that reached by our European brethren.
Well actually no, we don’t always :) Position only helps if you have a context, a red light is always on the left or the top, and well green lights in many countries have a lot of blue mixed into them (so I’m told - I really wouldn’t know). I once heard Dr Karl Kruszelnicki in Australia say this was done for specifically this reason, and its definetly more pronounced inAustralia than it here in the U S - Austin TX at least). Anyhow when approaching a light I can tell its not green (blueish), but I’m not sure if its red or amber. Plus from a distance it can be hard to tell its position depending on weather and light (i.e. at night its hard to make out the frame), so then I am looking for it to change, but either way I’m slowing down. Of course all this happens subconsciously, like changing gear.
As far as the topic at hand I tend to always work off the trains name rather than its color, its much more reliable. When visiting the MTA museum in NYC last October I actually thought the stylized map that was abandoned in the 70’s was much more readable. Color doesn’t pose much of a problem as long as they’re seperated, the current map can be a nightmare when lines converge.
BTW This is my first post, apologies if I screwed up the quoting
Just mind the gap.
Interesting article Jason - I’m glad London’s Underground system (and it’s map in particular) proved so interesting to you.
Andy (Hume’s) already given the link that I was also going to suggest…we’re both involved with the UK map industry so that’s hardly surprising! ;)
Actually, this article (and the link given by Elliot Jay Stocks) are very similar to an article written not long ago by Jeff Croft - after he visited London for the first time. Seems that the ‘Tube’ makes quite a good impression on American Designers!
I’ll agree with Frankie Roberto’s comment though: the design of the tube map, although brilliant, can lead to some really lazy use of the system - rather than being geographically more aware and giving better suggestions for pedestrian usage.
I had a similar experience with rail network in Japan. You don’t realise how important/useful the colours are until you go into stations that have maps only in Japanese:
http://www.tokyoessentials.com/images/tokyo-subway-map.jpg
I’m not colour blind, but I never got lost once.
When I was in college, one of my professors was very into environmental design (wayfinding and placemaking) and had actually designed ride interiors and wayfinding systems for Universal Studios. Since then, I’ve been fascinated every time I see that sort of work. You’d be surprised by how much there is to learn in the field (he spent several class periods talking about all the technical aspects and pitfalls), but it really seems like a rewarding career.
In response to the first comment left here I’d just mention something I’ve noticed since I moved to London.
Perhaps this is more common than I’m aware but on the London Underground when a blind person arrives at a station the station will immediately assign a person to them and escort them to the appropriate platform and wait with them until they’re on the train. The best part of this however is that once the train departs, the station assistant calls ahead to the blind person’s destination station so that as soon as the train pulls in there’s another station assistant ready to help the blind person off the train. They’re actually positioned at the correct door of the train so that the moment the doors open the blind person is immediately greeted and either escorted back up to ground level or onto the next connecting train.
I’ve never seen this before on any of the train services I’ve used around the world but of course it doesn’t mean it’s unique. What I can say is that I’ve seen it happen a few times and it’s always done seamlessly.
Wait, these maps are on old fashioned paper?! That’s gonna last maybe a decade. Once our parents are dead we’ll do it all with nanotubes.
On the London Underground… no, I doubt that unless they adopt a systematic approach that can be extended to other venues (airport terminals, public places) they’ll ever have a truly usable environment, much like Boston and other large cities that have all made the same mistakes.
From a corporate standpoint: When I worked at Staples, Inc they created an entire system of using office supplies as points of recognition for both sections of the main buildings (there are two plus a connector with training rooms) and myriad conference rooms (and there were never enough).
Iconography to assist in recognition of location is a wonderful and often overlooked thing.
Jason,
I’m glad you had no trouble finding your way on the underground when you visited London.
I too, was going to give the link to the mono map, but that’s been done already.
I used to travel regularly on the line that has the stop for the RNIB, and blind users could always get an escourt from street level to the platform.
You’re right, LU do radio ahead and tell the destination station they have a VIP (Visually Impaired Person) to greet :-)
The geo-map mentioned earlier is very interesting too, I’d never seen that before!
Great talk at @media, btw.
If you want to know when to skip the train in London, take a look at London Tube Map with Walklines: sometimes it’s quicker to walk.
The best part of this however is that once the train departs, the station assistant calls ahead to the blind person’s destination station so that as soon as the train pulls in there’s another station assistant ready to help the blind person off the train.
The Tube map is very easy to navigate, but the tube service is another story :D
If you live here in London and having to commute day in day out on the Northern line then you will notice the number delays due to signal failures.
There are a couple of firms out there who actually do this for a living, i.e. specialize in it. The one that tends to base its work on field research (and has published a couple books about it) has a site at http://www.wayfinding.com. They have a lot of hospital clients —- the stress of being a hospital visitor or potential patient contributes to confusion and disorientation, they say, which makes a lot of sense. So it can be a life or death matter to get it right.
I have anomalous trichromacy, which is probably the most common form of color blindness. So I often mess up red/orange blue/violet and other such colors that are very close in the visible spectrum. I’d say that, at least from my understanding, the color coded system works just fine even for the color blind.
Consider this, say a red and an orange are running side by side and there is a color blind person trying to read the map. Sure, they look extremely similar at a glance, but color-blind or not they are generally going to be of a different shade, thus making them still distinguishable from other lines, therefore color-coding is still effective.
As for true blindness, I don’t even know how to approach a wayfinding system such as the London Underground. It seems like it would be awfully complex.
The station logos on the Metro in Mexico City use logos, because the illiteracy rate was high when they built it.
More info about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metro#Station_logos
Just mind the gap
Very nice point of view! Respect!