Wayfinding Design: Avoid These 8 Common Mistakes
Interactive digital wayfinding is a highly effective tool for increasing customer engagement and boosting company revenue. However, that’s only true when it’s designed correctly.
When designed poorly, digital signage can obscure brand messaging, confuse customers, and ultimately send users packing.
If your organization is implementing digital wayfinding, Oppna Digital details eight design mistakes to avoid to achieve digital signage success.
1. Inappropriate Placement
What’s the point of a wayfinding solution if its placement doesn’t facilitate wayfinding? You should always implement interactive digital signage PRIOR to decision points.
To place signage effectively, you must first locate where users are most likely to make critical directional decisions within your establishment. Because wayfinding solutions help prompt user choice, signage must be highly visible and located well in advance of each decision point.
Unoptimized placement often results in customer confusion and frustration, which won’t promote repeat business.
2. Information Overload
Too much text information, wild color schemes, and excessive media will undoubtedly obscure your intended message. While wayfinding signage is meant to engage customers and prompt interaction, it must do so in a way that doesn’t overstimulate and ultimately disengage the user.
Imagine how you feel when you open a browser window and what seems like 20 different popups bombard your screen. It’s annoying, right? So what do you do? You click off that page.
That’s exactly how users feel when they’re bombarded with too much information. Keep your design crisp and clean to make the user experience as effortless as possible.
3. Poor Accessibility
It’s important to keep ADA guidelines in mind when designing interactive wayfinding solutions. If you’ve included touchable components, their placement must be accessible to everyone. Either place those features at the bottom of the screen or duplicate them in an ADA menu.
Other disabilities, such as color blindness, should also be considered in signage design. Accommodating the native language of your customer can also go a long way toward accessibility and understanding.Experienced UX designers – like our team at Oppna Digital – can make the appropriate design and color scheme recommendations, which will accommodate all users.
4. Poor User Design
User experience design is the heart and soul of any successful wayfinding solution. If you’re not considering the end-user when designing interactive wayfinding signage, you’re missing the point entirely.
Digital navigation isn’t meant to simply sit still and look fancy; It’s meant to provide additional value to the user through interaction, engagement, and ease of use.