Wayfinding: navigation systems in public spaces
Wayfinding, navigation and signage: where the boundary lies
Confusion in terminology hinders many projects from the very start. The client asks to 'make navigation', the contractor draws signs, but the problem remains unresolved — because the levels of the task are mixed up.
- Wayfinding — strategy and design process: analysis of routes, decision points, zoning logic, people's behavior in space.
- Navigation — the result of this work, a specific system of orientation: maps, signs, color codes, sound signals.
- Signage — the applied layer, the physical and graphic implementation of signs: font, material, size, mounting.
Mistakes are almost always born at the junction of the first and second level: signage is done well, but strategy — not at all, and beautiful signs are simply not where they are needed.
Case of Pulkovo: why the floor is more important than priority
When designing navigation in Pulkovo airport, the team encountered a classic trap of 'top-down' logic. Following the usual scheme, the Departures zone, being more prioritized for the airport, should be indicated first on any wall panel. In practice, this turned out to be wrong.
Departures is on the third floor, Arrivals is on the first. A person who has just exited an airplane physically stands on the first floor and first looks for an exit, not an abstract priority of the object. For him, indicating the floor is more important than the logical hierarchy of zones. They restructured the system: first — 'where I am and what is here on this floor,' then detail within the zone. This simple observation changed the entire structure of information panels and reduced the number of incorrect routes.
Accessibility: what is actually needed by people with disabilities
Accessibility requirements are often reduced in briefs to the formal phrase 'consider low-mobility groups,' without specificity. In practice, the system must simultaneously address three different types of limitations, and solutions for them are not universal.
- For people in wheelchairs — the absence of thresholds in the path, duplication of information at the height of the overview from the chair, the width of passages near counters and elevators.
- For people with low vision — contrast between background and text, large font size, absence of glare-inducing surfaces on signs.
- For blind people — tactile mnemonics with Braille font and voiceover. An important detail: tactile schemes must be supplemented with voice in rooms of 150 m² or with more than 15 navigation objects, because only about 10% of blind people use Braille font — for the rest, a scheme without sound is useless.
It is also important to consider people with cognitive impairments and simply tired, anxious visitors — they especially need clear landmarks, not long text instructions.
Media and formats: what to choose for a specific space
The set of wayfinding tools is divided into physical and digital media, and they solve different tasks, not competing with each other.
| Media | Where effective | Limitation |
|---|---|---|
| Wall and ceiling-mounted signs | Corridors, route forks | Require regular updates during reconfigurations |
| Posts and pillars | Large areas, entrance zones, parking lots | Expensive to produce and install |
| Floor navigation | Hospitals, museums, shopping centers with high traffic flow | Wears out, requires wear-resistant materials |
| Color codes and pictograms | Metro, airports, multilingual environment | Need for a preliminary legend for new visitors |
| QR codes and applications | Large objects with a changeable structure (exhibitions, campuses) | Depend on smartphone and level of digital literacy |
Why digital navigation has not replaced physical
QR-code-based systems such as Find My Way, QRCodeMaps, or CUE System are growing rapidly, and some of them no longer require the Internet — they work through an autonomous browser engine right from the smartphone. But this does not solve the basic problem: you need to take out the phone, unlock it, scan the code, and understand the interface — three or four extra actions where a physical pointer is perceived in a second by peripheral vision. Emergency situation, dead phone, child in arms — and the entire digital system becomes useless. Therefore, in airports and hospitals digital services work as a supplement to physical signage, not as a replacement for it.
Identity in navigation: the indicator as a brand carrier
Here, the connection between branding and wayfinding is most often lost: the indicator is perceived as a technical detail, not as a point of contact with the identity. This is a mistake — navigation is seen by visitors more often than the logo at the entrance.
A special font called ‘Staromoskovskiy’ was developed for indicators in Moscow metro — it not only solves the readability issue but also creates a recognizable visual code of the city, which is perceived as part of the metro identity, not just a set of letters on a sign. Moscow pedestrian navigation (ESN), which appeared only by 2014 year — before that, there was no unified system in the city at all — uses a dark blue background with white letters specifically to distinguish it from road signs and traffic lights, while still being readable as a unified brand style of the city.
The practical conclusion is simple: brand colors, fonts, and pictograms must be included in the navigation specification from the very beginning, not added afterward on top of a completed engineering scheme. Otherwise, you'll end up with a signpost that works but looks like a foreign object in the brand space.
Typical mistakes and how to test the system before launch
Most wayfinding failures occur not due to poor signage design, but because of the gap between the designer's plan and actual human behavior.
- Information overload — people try to fit everything at once onto one indicator. While working on the navigation of Moscow metro, about 90% of the team's efforts went into leaving only the necessary information, automatically filtering objects by the rating of their significance, and removing the rest.
- Relying on instructions instead of landmarks. Research on behavior shows: people find routes worse when the landmark on the indicator does not match reality, than when the turn direction is incorrectly indicated. The brain clings to images, not abstract 'turn right after 20 meters'.
- Designing according to a blueprint without stepping into real space — points of visibility on the plan and in real life often do not match due to pillars, shop windows, crowds.
You can test the system before full launch in stages — this is cheaper than redoing signage after installation:
- Walk the route as a first-time visitor: without hints from staff, without knowledge of the building, noting every point where hesitation or doubt arises.
- Identify decision points on the plan — forks, stairs, exits from elevators — and check whether each has a visible landmark, not twenty meters after it.
- Make paper or cardboard mockups of key indicators and place them in real space before final production order — this reveals issues with height, viewing angle, and glare.
- Conduct a test with real people from different groups, including people with vision and mobility limitations, and record the time and number of errors on the route.
- Make revisions to the structure, not just the graphics — if a person gets confused, the issue is often not with the sign's font, but with the order of information on it.
What ultimately determines the quality of navigation
A good wayfinding system is almost never noticeable as a standalone design object — it simply doesn't let people ask the question 'where to go.' A bad system is immediately noticeable because it creates queues at information desks, lost people by elevators, and complaints that rarely reach the marketing department but hurt reputation just as much as bad advertising.
Three things should be kept in priority in any project: strategy cannot be skipped in favor of beautiful graphics, accessibility cannot be closed with one universal measure for all groups of restrictions, and brand identity must be built into the technical specification from day one, not glued on top of a finished engineering scheme. A system designed with these three points in mind works for years without major revision — and this is what truly indicates its quality, not the number of signs installed.
Wayfinding, navigation and signage: where the boundary lies
Confusion in terminology hinders many projects from the very start. The client asks to 'make navigation', the contractor draws signs, but the problem remains unresolved — because the levels of the task are mixed up.
- Wayfinding — strategy and design process: analysis of routes, decision points, zoning logic, people's behavior in space.
- Navigation — the result of this work, a specific system of orientation: maps, signs, color codes, sound signals.
- Signage — the applied layer, the physical and graphic implementation of signs: font, material, size, mounting.
Mistakes are almost always born at the junction of the first and second level: signage is done well, but strategy — not at all, and beautiful signs are simply not where they are needed.
Case of Pulkovo: why the floor is more important than priority
When designing navigation in Pulkovo airport, the team encountered a classic trap of 'top-down' logic. Following the usual scheme, the Departures zone, being more prioritized for the airport, should be indicated first on any wall panel. In practice, this turned out to be wrong.
Departures is on the third floor, Arrivals is on the first. A person who has just exited an airplane physically stands on the first floor and first looks for an exit, not an abstract priority of the object. For him, indicating the floor is more important than the logical hierarchy of zones. They restructured the system: first — 'where I am and what is here on this floor,' then detail within the zone. This simple observation changed the entire structure of information panels and reduced the number of incorrect routes.
Accessibility: what is actually needed by people with disabilities
Accessibility requirements are often reduced in briefs to the formal phrase 'consider low-mobility groups,' without specificity. In practice, the system must simultaneously address three different types of limitations, and solutions for them are not universal.
- For people in wheelchairs — the absence of thresholds in the path, duplication of information at the height of the overview from the chair, the width of passages near counters and elevators.
- For people with low vision — contrast between background and text, large font size, absence of glare-inducing surfaces on signs.
- For blind people — tactile mnemonics with Braille font and voiceover. An important detail: tactile schemes must be supplemented with voice in rooms of 150 m² or with more than 15 navigation objects, because only about 10% of blind people use Braille font — for the rest, a scheme without sound is useless.
It is also important to consider people with cognitive impairments and simply tired, anxious visitors — they especially need clear landmarks, not long text instructions.
Media and formats: what to choose for a specific space
The set of wayfinding tools is divided into physical and digital media, and they solve different tasks, not competing with each other.
| Media | Where effective | Limitation |
|---|---|---|
| Wall and ceiling-mounted signs | Corridors, route forks | Require regular updates during reconfigurations |
| Posts and pillars | Large areas, entrance zones, parking lots | Expensive to produce and install |
| Floor navigation | Hospitals, museums, shopping centers with high traffic flow | Wears out, requires wear-resistant materials |
| Color codes and pictograms | Metro, airports, multilingual environment | Need for a preliminary legend for new visitors |
| QR codes and applications | Large objects with a changeable structure (exhibitions, campuses) | Depend on smartphone and level of digital literacy |
Why digital navigation has not replaced physical
QR-code-based systems such as Find My Way, QRCodeMaps, or CUE System are growing rapidly, and some of them no longer require the Internet — they work through an autonomous browser engine right from the smartphone. But this does not solve the basic problem: you need to take out the phone, unlock it, scan the code, and understand the interface — three or four extra actions where a physical pointer is perceived in a second by peripheral vision. Emergency situation, dead phone, child in arms — and the entire digital system becomes useless. Therefore, in airports and hospitals digital services work as a supplement to physical signage, not as a replacement for it.
Identity in navigation: the indicator as a brand carrier
Here, the connection between branding and wayfinding is most often lost: the indicator is perceived as a technical detail, not as a point of contact with the identity. This is a mistake — navigation is seen by visitors more often than the logo at the entrance.
A special font called ‘Staromoskovskiy’ was developed for indicators in Moscow metro — it not only solves the readability issue but also creates a recognizable visual code of the city, which is perceived as part of the metro identity, not just a set of letters on a sign. Moscow pedestrian navigation (ESN), which appeared only by 2014 year — before that, there was no unified system in the city at all — uses a dark blue background with white letters specifically to distinguish it from road signs and traffic lights, while still being readable as a unified brand style of the city.
The practical conclusion is simple: brand colors, fonts, and pictograms must be included in the navigation specification from the very beginning, not added afterward on top of a completed engineering scheme. Otherwise, you'll end up with a signpost that works but looks like a foreign object in the brand space.
Typical mistakes and how to test the system before launch
Most wayfinding failures occur not due to poor signage design, but because of the gap between the designer's plan and actual human behavior.
- Information overload — people try to fit everything at once onto one indicator. While working on the navigation of Moscow metro, about 90% of the team's efforts went into leaving only the necessary information, automatically filtering objects by the rating of their significance, and removing the rest.
- Relying on instructions instead of landmarks. Research on behavior shows: people find routes worse when the landmark on the indicator does not match reality, than when the turn direction is incorrectly indicated. The brain clings to images, not abstract 'turn right after 20 meters'.
- Designing according to a blueprint without stepping into real space — points of visibility on the plan and in real life often do not match due to pillars, shop windows, crowds.
You can test the system before full launch in stages — this is cheaper than redoing signage after installation:
- Walk the route as a first-time visitor: without hints from staff, without knowledge of the building, noting every point where hesitation or doubt arises.
- Identify decision points on the plan — forks, stairs, exits from elevators — and check whether each has a visible landmark, not twenty meters after it.
- Make paper or cardboard mockups of key indicators and place them in real space before final production order — this reveals issues with height, viewing angle, and glare.
- Conduct a test with real people from different groups, including people with vision and mobility limitations, and record the time and number of errors on the route.
- Make revisions to the structure, not just the graphics — if a person gets confused, the issue is often not with the sign's font, but with the order of information on it.
What ultimately determines the quality of navigation
A good wayfinding system is almost never noticeable as a standalone design object — it simply doesn't let people ask the question 'where to go.' A bad system is immediately noticeable because it creates queues at information desks, lost people by elevators, and complaints that rarely reach the marketing department but hurt reputation just as much as bad advertising.
Three things should be kept in priority in any project: strategy cannot be skipped in favor of beautiful graphics, accessibility cannot be closed with one universal measure for all groups of restrictions, and brand identity must be built into the technical specification from day one, not glued on top of a finished engineering scheme. A system designed with these three points in mind works for years without major revision — and this is what truly indicates its quality, not the number of signs installed.
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