Hospital Wayfinding

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Hospital Wayfinding

_2017

When poor wayfinding occurs in hospitals, it often comes with hidden costs such as staff time in directing people, patients arriving late or missing appointments. Becoming lost, or disoriented in these unfamiliar spaces causes stress and anxiety, especially for first time visitors who are distracted from focusing on their hospital visit.

The main entrance on level 5 of Auckland City Hospital welcomes over one million visitors a year and was an ideal canvas for demonstrating a new approach to wayfinding at Auckland Hospital.

A good wayfinding system lets you know where you are, where you are going and how to get there. More than just adding signs, effective wayfinding solutions must be integrated into the environment and contrast with its surroundings for maximum legibility.

Lift shafts were landmarked by vibrant colour blocking. The three public lifts are core navigational nodes through the hospital and are easy to describe - e.g.‘I’m by the blue lift’.

Information is simplified, removing acronyms and staff-only destinations from directories. Where possible, universal icons were used in place of words to create a hierarchy that prioritised clinical destinations. Icons were custom built to compliment Wayfinding Sans, and referenced ISO standards.

There was a strong resolve to design for the physically, cognitively and visually impaired. Workshops were run to understand these user needs and prototypes presented for testing and critique. Baseline testing of key journeys was conducted to identify pain points and guide design decisions. As the refurbishment was staggered, we used this opportunity to prototype wayfinding to scale, evaluating user flows and gaining feedback from patients and staff before designs were finalised.