Wayfinding: Best practices in retail

by all | 15 February 2017 10:15 am

By Craig M. Berger
The term ‘wayfinding’ has come a long way since Kevin Lynch first used it in an architectural context in his 1960 book, The Image of the City, where he defined it as the consistent organization of sensory clues in the external environment. In 1984, Romedi Passini’s book, Wayfinding in Architecture, expanded upon this definition to encompass visual graphics, tactile surfaces and audible communications.

Wayfinding through the use of signs has grown dramatically as a field over the past 30 years or so, as part of the profession of environmental graphic design (EGD). There is now considerable wayfinding expertise available when planning airports, hospitals, office buildings and college campuses, among other facilities, validated by educational programs, seminars and books.

Retail wayfinding, however, has defied being channelled into a specific discipline. Rather, wayfinding has been treated as a component of multiple retail-related disciplines, such as visual merchandising, customer experience design, digital signage and mobile engagement, which are all well-entrenched with their own publications, academic studies and professional associations. To understand best practices for wayfinding signs in retail, it is important to understand how each of these disciplines relates to wayfinding.

Profitable retailers tend to (a) be meticulous about gathering data and (b) constantly experiment with new approaches to attract customers. Given the complex interplay between merchandising, distribution and promotion, the best-managed retailers have a firm hand on both traditional processes and new innovations.

The psychology of shopping
Retail wayfinding begins with the development of a strategy for managing a customer’s in-store experience. In his books Why We Buy (2000) and Call of the Mall (2005), Paco Underhill argued shopping is a cognitive science and sales can be improved by successfully manipulating the physical environment through the planning of stores, placement of displays and use of signs. David Kepron’s 2014 book, Retail (r)Evolution, expanded on the notion of measuring the customer experience by analyzing retail stores as social environments, where the customer seeks entertainment in addition to products.

Store layout
Store planning is deeply rooted in tradition. Supermarkets and departments stores, for example, have used similar planning formulas for decades. Signs, too, have closely conformed to practices honed over many years of experience. The ‘racetrack’ and ‘grid’ plans developed by retailers in the 1950s—and the sign practices used to support them—are still in use today, with small modifications.

Some companies have grown famous for breaking traditional store layout models and redefining the role of signs to support them, but tradition and experience still play important roles in how people shop. One area where the use of signs has grown, even in traditional plans, has been the installation of brand-specific product displays as visual cues in key areas of the store to attract attention.

Early in its history, Ikea broke away from store planning traditions with a format that combined practices from showrooms, supermarkets and warehouses. Its signs were also revolutionary, adopting graphic approaches and typography from transportation facilities like airports and train stations and applying them to a retail environment.

Another major retail innovation has been the use of a hierarchy of signs and displays to visually break a store into components, from large departments to specific product brands. While this trend started in smaller convenience stores and pharmacies, it is now becoming a key strategy in larger apparel and houseware stores.

A final trend has been the ‘store-in-a-store’ strategy, whereby a major product brand is represented with a pavilion or entire section of a shop, with its own branding, fixtures and displays. Already popular in department stores for some time, this trend has expanded to other retail spaces.

Experience design
The term ‘experience design’ was first used in the 1999 book The Experience Economy, by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, to explain how companies that once simply created products or offered services are now packaging entire experiences for their customers. Today, business and design consultancies that specialize in experience design have transformed many retail environments.

One area where experience design has had an enormous impact is reinforcing consistency of nomenclature, terminology and imagery between retailers’ wayfinding signs, marketing materials and websites. Indeed, this has become a core strategy for retailers to improve their overall appeal to customers.

Approximately five years ago, for example, Walmart undertook complete renovations based on an experience analysis by Lippincott, a creative consultancy. Improvements were made to everything from interior signs to website formatting, resulting in a seven per cent increase in store traffic among higher-income customers.

Similarly, in 2008, Canada’s Toronto-Dominion (TD) Bank converted the Commerce Bank branches it had acquired in the U.S., with the assistance of Toronto-based EGD firm Shikatani Lacroix. The project focused on developing specific ‘touchpoints’ that would have the biggest impact on the customer experience, including modular systems for marketing financial products that closely aligned with the branches’ window frames, as well as illuminated signs at the service desk, automated teller machines (ATMs) and lobby, all managed so as to minimize clutter. Newer locations also featured greater integration of digital signage into the architecture.

Effective signs
For many years, signs were considered the most disposable components of retail stores. They were made with inexpensive materials and changed out with minimal thought given to their scale, clutter or impact beyond the immediately obvious need to identify an area of the store.

With recent efforts to improve the customer experience, many retailers now see signs as an important investment, worthy of the same care as other in-store fixtures. This has led to improvements in a number of areas:

Legibility
Many store designs now reflect the importance of legible signs, to the point where modelling software is used to preview and analyze customers’ viewing ‘corridors’ before an actual store is built. Legibility is achieved through a combination of typeface, scale and contrast.

Dimensionality
Retailers are finding opportunities to use channel letters, projecting signs, awnings and other traditional outdoor signs inside their stores. By replacing typically ‘flat’ indoor signs, they help make the interiors look more like storefronts or street fairs.

Illumination
Similarly, the same light-emitting diodes (LEDs) used for exterior illumination are finding their way inside stores. One leading trend has been the use of cove and soffit lighting to illuminate indoor signs, particularly those identifying the departments within a store.

Modularity and material quality
Modular sign systems have always been integral to stores, but now some of them are becoming more closely linked to merchandising fixtures, to the point where they become the same system. This approach tends to boost the quality of store signs by matching them to the same material standards as fixtures.

Window displays
Successful store navigation does not rely on signs alone, but rather brings architecture and displays together to create a complete environment that both directs and informs customers. Window displays have become more common, for example, because store architecture has become more ‘transparent,’ with larger glass panels to decorate.

With the removal of enclosed, ‘boxed’ windows, displays have become a much greater part of overall store design and a primary supporter of wayfinding. Designers use themed window displays as landmarks to entice visitors into a store and to promote sales of specific items. Large-format digital printing, modular panels, illumination, dimensional displays and digital signage can all be integrated to meet these communication demands.

Visual merchandising
The multi-billion-dollar visual merchandising industry, comprising everything from fixtures to merchandising displays to point-of-purchase (POP) graphics, can be thought of as a sort of central operating system (OS) for retailers, following practices that are sensitive to customers’ actions and psychology. Within this field, retail signage is often categorized at two levels: (a) ‘macro’ signs that identify key areas of a store, are relatively ‘fixed’ and cannot be changed easily; and (b) ‘micro’ POP and promotional signs that are more flexible and adaptable to the ever-changing retail environment.

Excellence in retail wayfinding is often achieved through a close correlation between how the macro and micro levels of signs are managed, so as to achieve seamless integration, rather than gaps in consistency and/or quality. One reason today’s visual merchandisers have innovated in this direction is the considerable pressure to compete with online shopping. This is also one of the reasons for the increased use of digital signage.

Marketing and promotion
Marketing departments have an outsized impact on wayfinding signs in retail environments. With access to high-quality large-format digital printing, they have worked in recent years to turn promotion into part of the wayfinding process, with large-scale marketing materials integrated into lightboxes, fixtures and windows.

The growth in large-format printed graphics has also resulted in ‘mergers’ between industries. The packaging and fixtures industries, for example, have combined their efforts to better control how products are displayed in stores, with less need for intervention by in-store personnel. Trade show exhibit fabricators have found new opportunities in the retail sector by developing pop-up stores and branded pavilions.

Branded environments
Eva L. Maddox was the first designer to coin the term ‘branded environment’ in reference to the integration of branded communications in EGD. She designed spaces for corporations, universities and hospitals until she retired in February 2016.

Closely aligned with the aforementioned discipline of experience design, branded environments have evolved with explorations of architecture, materials and space to reinforce corporate and institutional identities. In the retail sector, this evolution has resulted in stores that share design attributes with other types of facilities, including airports, offices and residential buildings. As such, signs and other wayfinding elements for these stores have been specified for greater permanence and tightly integrated with interior decor.

Digital signage
In the last decade or so, digital retail technology has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry unto itself, affecting every aspect of the buying and selling experience. Many retailers have worked to develop proprietary systems that link their websites, inventory logistics and in-store purchasing into one seamless whole.

Extending these systems to digital signage, however, has not always been so straightforward. Beyond front-of-store and key ‘landmark’ digital signs, in-store networks have been somewhat difficult to develop because of high upfront costs, along with those for ongoing management.

That said, digital signage has made significant headway with content-intensive retailers, including those specializing in electronics and communications products. The next frontier for these systems will be interactive digital signage, whereby customer behaviour and specific purchases will affect on-screen content. Indeed, many retailers believe responsive content will allow them to truly realize the potential value of their investments in digital signage technology.

Craig M. Berger is chair of the visual presentation and exhibition design department of the Fashion Institute of Technology’s (FIT’s) School of Art and Design. This article is based on a project spearheaded by the Sign Research Foundation (SRF), a charitable non-profit organization that supplies academic research on effective sign strategies, systems and codes and facilitates dialogue between architects, urban planners, developers, code officials, business owners and designers to help support more navigable cities, thriving businesses and strong urban identities. For more information, visit www.signresearch.org[6].

Source URL: https://www.signmedia.ca/wayfinding-best-practices-in-retail/

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