Marty Gregg
Principal, ArtHouse Design, Denver
Dating back to ancient empires and cultures, wayfinding historically helped the adventurous traveler navigate new and unmarked territories. Enhancing the user experience in today’s hot real estate market, wayfinding helps owners and managers of residential, commercial, industrial and land properties build their brand reputation – and save time and money.
What is wayfinding? To understand wayfinding, you have to start by defining branding. Branding is a combination of visual and verbal communication that distinctly identifies a company, product or service. A well-defined brand is the story of who you are, what you do and why do you it. In real estate, branding for the built environment also identifies landmarks: physical structures, locations and spaces.
Wayfinding helps you share your brand story. It supports, shapes and strengthens branding through signage, graphics and art to influence a person’s understanding of – and experience with – a physical environment.
Using images and messaging, wayfinding elements such as maps, directories, locators and room numbers inform people of their surrounding environment to help them get from where they are to where they want to be. Wayfinding creates a logical flow of information to welcome and guide people from the moment they arrive – across the street, at the gate, in the parking garage, through the front door – to the moment they leave your property. By providing information at strategic decision points along a path, such as lobbies, restrooms, corridors and elevators, wayfinding helps them move in the right direction with comfort and ease. People, particularly new visitors, customers and employees who are uninitiated, feel less confused, stressed and fatigued and more confident and secure throughout their journey on your property or in your building.
Like any good design project, successful wayfinding is comprehensive, consistent, clear and concise. A collective set of processes, behaviors and rules, a comprehensive wayfinding system should be aesthetically attractive and relevant yet thoughtfully functional and intuitive. For property or facility managers and building owners, wayfinding signage is often the first element that people interact with, making the earliest – and most important – impression of your brand.
The valuable benefits of wayfinding in real estate. From urban centers and transportation hubs to health care facilities and educational campuses to multifamily communities and retail shops, all residential, commercial, industrial and land properties can benefit from wayfinding. Wayfinding is ideal for new construction, remodels or additions, relocations, renovations, expansions and upgrades, particularly in busy, high-stress areas. If done well, a comprehensive wayfinding system helps you simplify complex, overwhelming and changing environments to improve the function of a space – and the experience of the user.
Wayfinding increases your brand presence and awareness to attract attention and interest. It directs people to your location and invites them to come inside. With interior and exterior signage, wayfinding makes your property, facility or building look and feel smart, well-established and efficient. And it provides information without using human resources, supporting customer service while improving business operations. Connecting people to places, wayfinding shows visitors that you care about their experience on your property.
Compared to many other needs of a large build-out, wayfinding can be relatively lower in cost yet high in yield.
Courtesy ArtHouse Design
6 Steps for Effective Wayfinding
You should be thinking about wayfinding long before the development site and architecture have taken shape. Ideally, you want to start working with an experiential graphic designer while your design-build project is being conceptualized and laid out. The following steps will help you work with designers to ensure wayfinding fully integrates with a new or existing space.
1. Kick off. A good designer should listen – a lot. You have been living with your project for years and probably have a deep understanding of the problems and challenges that a wayfinding system needs to solve. A successful, effective wayfinding system aligns with your grand vision of a project.
2. Strategize and plan. With a solid understanding of your goals, a good designer should break down the project and imagine it from a new user perspective. Analyzing the workflow and traffic flow, designers think about how people move around in and interact with a space to anticipate user needs and identify obstacles. At this point, they also should be considering city and owner regulations and restrictions to ensure the designs will be approved.
