The personal disquiet of

Mark Boulton

May 26th, 2005

Some thoughts about signs

{title}For a few years now I’ve had a bit of an interest in sig­nage. Recently I was the only per­son to get a bit excited about a road trans­port exhib­i­tion in the Design Museum in Lon­don. Why? Well, signs are really inter­est­ing when you start think­ing about them. So, here’s some thoughts about signs and how we, as design­ers, can look at them dif­fer­ently and incor­por­ate some the ideas behind sig­nage into what we do. 

Sig­nage does a num­ber of things — it helps us get to where we want to go, it informs us, warns us and the list goes on. Let’s deal with the first one… (or if you’re not bothered, skip straight to the confab)

From A to B

Get­ting to where we want to be. It’s a big deal, and sig­nage helps us do that. The pro­fes­sional ser­vice ded­ic­ated to just this is called Way­find­ing, and it does just that, helps us find our way. Way­find­ing sig­nage is found in almost every city, build­ing and civ­il­ised envir­on­ment on the globe, from offi­cial road signs to hand painted ‘toi­let’ signs in local cafe’s.

Hav­ing been involved in a couple of way­find­ing pro­jects I found the research and devel­op­ment fas­cin­at­ing. It usu­ally involved devel­op­ing a sig­nage sys­tem, mock­ing it up in black and white prints and build­ing wooden stands, then pos­i­tion­ing them in a space and watch­ing how people fol­low them. As they were tem­por­ary we could audit the people flow and make the required changes so that people could find what they want.

Design­ing a sig­nage sys­tem is a little like try­ing to guess what people want to do in a space. For pub­lic build­ings, like lib­rar­ies and museums, they have to inform in addi­tion to point­ing people in the right dir­ec­tion. Museums are par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing and, you’ve guessed where I’m head­ing with this, the sim­il­ar­it­ies between museum sig­nage and web site archi­tec­ture are plenty.

Where’s the f**king toilet

When some­body enteres a build­ing, espe­cially if they’ve had a long jour­ney or they had too much orange juice in the morn­ing, they will want to know one thing — ‘where is the toi­let’, they will be single minded in that task as well. They will look for one of two things, a sign with the word, or if it’s in another lan­guage an icon of a man or a woman. That’s it. They shouldn’t have to learn a new sig­nage sys­tem, or try and work out a designer’s ‘cre­at­ive’ impres­sion of what a toi­let sign should be. 

My point is this. Uni­ver­sal sig­nage sys­tems have been developed to over­come lan­guage so that man­u­fac­tur­ers don’t have to pro­duce sev­eral products for dif­fer­ent mar­kets. This sys­tem works well until some­body does it dif­fer­ently and your daugh­ter pees her pants because you couldn’t find the toi­lets because they cli­ent wanted to be ‘different’!

The same goes for web sites.

Provide clear signage

A user will come to a web site with a spe­cific task in mind. Not going to the toi­let, but more like they want to com­plain about some­thing or they need to buy their daugh­ter some new pants.

I may be preach­ing to the con­ver­ted but put­ting the user first, under­stand­ing their goals and design­ing to them is the best way to deliver on the sites goals.

I know I’m open­ing up a big can of worms here with pos­sible dis­cus­sion about icon­o­graphy, semi­ot­ics, usab­il­ity, Inform­a­tion archi­tec­ture, UCD etc. But under­stand­ing how sig­nage works can go a long way to under­stand­ing how people nav­ig­ate on a web site.

I’ve been doing a little read­ing on the sub­ject and it’s a bit like open­ing Pandora’s Box. There is a lot out there, spe­cific­ally on semi­ot­ics, but dip­ping into lin­guist­ics and psy­cho­logy. It’s quite dif­fi­cult to fil­ter some of the inform­a­tion and make it use­ful for you in a prac­tical sense and you can’t read everything right?

So, here’s what I’ve found out so far…

Let’s start with Semiotics

Semi­ot­ics is the study of signs and sym­bols and their use or inter­pret­a­tion. There are three main areas:

Extract­ing mean­ing from the signs is then pos­sible once we under­stand the struc­ture of the signs. They can be cat­egor­ised like this:

Icon
This resembles the sign. A pho­to­graph, a dia­gram, even a sound like ‘bang’.
Index
This rep­res­ents a link between the sign and it’s mean­ing. Smoke and fire for example, traffic light colours.
Sym­bol
These signs have no logical mean­ing between the sign. An example of this would be where a sym­bol has become linked with an organ­isa­tion or product, the red cross for example. Sym­bols are com­monly used for logotypes.

How is this use­ful in design­ing for the web? Well, extremely and not just web design either but design­ing for any medium.

A per­son has to estab­lish mean­ing from a sign or sym­bol. They then use this mean­ing to do many things, one of which could be to accom­plish a task. The closer the design of the sign is to the task, the quicker mean­ing is under­stood and the task is completed. 

{title}

There is of course the Usab­il­ity / Aes­thetic effect to take into account too. With this in mind apply­ing it to web site design is actu­ally quite straight forward.

A few things to consider

  1. When design­ing icons for web sites or applic­a­tions draw on real world sig­nage stand­ards if you can. If you can’t, try draw­ing on meta­phor. Arbit­rary shapes for icons will not work.
  2. When think­ing about labels for your nav­ig­a­tion, think clearly. Simple words for con­tent will go a long way in short­en­ing the gap between sign and task completion.
  3. Use col­our care­fully. Point users in the right dir­ec­tion with high con­trast signs, or but­tons. Just as you may speed down the road at 70 mile an hour and read a sign in less than 2 seconds, a user speeds through a web­site and may not give you more than two seconds. Be con­spi­cious with your signs.
  4. Be con­sist­ent with your sig­nage. Be it words or icons, be con­sist­ent in design and tone of voice. Let your users know what to expect.

There’s just a few things I’ve picked up over the past few years. Once I get some more stuff worked out, I’ll let you know. In the mean­time I thought it may be fun to have a bit of a sig­nage confab.

How about a sig­nage confab?

Every designer likes icons or signs right? What’s your favour­ite? This could be a pho­to­graph of one, one you’ve designed, sky’s the limit. Usual con­fab stuff applies:

  1. Host the image on your server and link it in here.
  2. Simple HTML is fine.
  3. Keep it below 400px wide please or you’ll bust me layout.

Oh, and here’s mine…

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2005 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Design, Information Architecture.

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17 Responses to “Some thoughts about signs”

  1. Johan Sjostrand said on: May 26th, 2005 at 5:43 pm

    Yay. More IA art­icles. Now I have another art­icle to send to cli­ents who stands by their internal buzzwords etc instead of the needs of their users. Thanks Mark. 

    On a sid­e­note, thanks for not selling out to google ads like alot of people do these days. Your cred­ab­il­ity only get’s stronger by this.

  2. Johan Sjostrand said on: May 26th, 2005 at 5:44 pm

    Just noticed the ads… Well.. Thanks anyway.

  3. Mark Boulton said on: May 26th, 2005 at 5:52 pm

    Thanks Johan, glad you liked it. Any signs to add? btw. the ads are there simply to go some way to pay for my host­ing — every little helps right?

  4. Johan Sjostrand said on: May 26th, 2005 at 6:12 pm

    I love the first aid sign. Like the stop sign, it’s incred­ible valu­able to soci­ety. Really any sym­bol that stretches across dif­fer­ent cul­tures amazes me. 

    About google ads,

    I think it’s incred­ible devi­ous to begin with. Google’s motto “Do no evil” don’t seem to apply here. I mean, you get ads that cor­rospond pretty much spot on to your interests since it’s pick­ing up on keywords. It’s so hard to res­ist some­times.

    But most of all, I don’t like how it’s decreases cred­ab­il­ity online.

    A dona­tion option would serv the same pur­pose and you would not push ads for com­pan­ies you don’t even know exists.. All­right, enough lefty talk from me.

  5. Josh said on: May 26th, 2005 at 7:47 pm

    I may be tak­ing your “sign” ana­logy one step too far, but since I have a degree in archi­tec­ture, I feel that I need to chime in on your “where’s the toi­let?” example. 

    For an archi­tect, a sign is an impli­cit recog­ni­tion of fail­ure of teh design to com­mu­nic­ate prop­erly. (not in all cases, but hey, i’m gen­er­al­iz­ing) If you go into a res­taur­ant and you are look­ing for the toi­let, you typ­ic­ally head towards the bar or the back of the res­taur­ant, or the design is arranged in such as way that you see the toi­lets on the way in, before you need them.

    A long digres­sion, but I think this is also applic­able to the web. Con­ven­tions in web design pre-empt user con­fu­sion. Things like: a click­able logo in the top-left that serves as a “home” but­ton, left-hand nav, top-nav, search at the top-right, etc. all anti­cip­ate user beha­vior and mit­ig­ate the need for “point­ers” (signs) to retrain them to use your revolu­tion­ary new flash-based navigation. 

    Not that I don’t like new ideas, but… you get my point, dontcha?

  6. Mark Boulton said on: May 26th, 2005 at 8:01 pm

    Josh — You’ve got a good point and whilst this works for simple build­ings, such as res­taur­ants with a back and front and a device with which you can ori­ent you­self (in your example a bar), I don’t whether you can apply this to com­plex build­ings such as air­port terminals. 

    Like you say, the same can be said of web­sites. Simple web­sites could simply rely on con­ven­tions. More com­plex website’s, with mul­tiple goals for users, need clear signage. 

    But I know what you mean. My dad’s an archi­tect and he hates signs. In fact I think most archi­tects do, which is why most way­find­ing con­sult­ants work inde­pend­ently from the archi­tects — the two pro­fes­sions don’t mix well.

  7. Brian said on: May 26th, 2005 at 8:02 pm

    How does get­ting paid for all your time, energy, and expenses mean you’re selling out? Mark clearly put a lot of effort into a post, even com­ing up with a nice illus­tra­tion for his point. How does it reduce his cred­ib­il­ity to have an ad that some people will find use­ful and you didn’t even notice?

  8. Brian said on: May 26th, 2005 at 8:13 pm

    Now on topic… 

    This spring I’ve seen a ton of busi­nesses advert­ising along the road using people as signs/sign hold­ers. I think this is more about con­text than the actual sig­nage, you cer­tainly take notice. Once you’ve got the person’s atten­tion, then the sign needs to be clear and to the point (espe­cially on the road­side.) Whether it’s a per­son with a sand­wich board (as in my photo from NYC) or in a cow cos­tume, I’ve noticed how much I’ve been noti­cing them so I guess it’s working.

    HPIM1365

  9. Charles said on: May 27th, 2005 at 1:34 am

    Where did you get that pic­ture of the Korean stop sign? I’ve lived in Korea for ten years, driven here and there around the coun­try, and I can’t remem­ber the last time I saw a stop sign…

  10. Richard Rutter said on: May 27th, 2005 at 8:41 am

    As a Brit, Amer­ican road signs have always held some fas­cin­a­tion for me, espe­cially the more tem­por­ary signs. I saw this sign in Aus­tin, Tx: 

    Be pre­pared to stop

    There’s some­thing slightly charm­ing and naive about the word­ing. In the UK, we’d prob­ably just say ‘Cau­tion’ or ‘Road­works ahead’, which leave it up to the driver to decide on his or her course of action as opposed to the dir­ect instruc­tion provided stateside.

  11. Richard Rutter said on: May 27th, 2005 at 8:48 am

    As a Brit, Amer­ican road signs have always held some fas­cin­a­tion for me, espe­cially the more tem­por­ary signs. I saw this sign in Aus­tin, Tx: 

    Be prepared to stop

    There?s some­thing slightly charm­ing and naive about the word­ing. In the UK, we?d prob­ably just say ?Cau­tion? or ?Road­works ahead?, which leave it up to the driver to decide on his or her course of action as opposed to the dir­ect instruc­tion provided stateside. 

    [Sorry about the double post. It’s early]

  12. Waylan said on: May 27th, 2005 at 3:08 pm

    Josh- While I under­stand your argu­ment and yes, build­ings should be designed so that it is obvi­ous where things are, you still need signs. Assum­ing a res­taur­ant has the per­fect lay­out, without signs I will only see a couple doors. I need to know which door takes me to the men’s room and which is the women’s toi­let. Using Mark’s ana­logy, if my daugh­ter has an emer­gency and I rush in, I don’t have time to ask someone or start explor­ing which door she needs to go through. While the explor­ing should be avoided at all times, for obvi­ous reas­ons, in this instance the need for con­cise, eas­ily recog­niz­able signs are cer­tainly import­ant. No, there is no need for signs pos­ted all over the build­ing dir­ect­ing people to that area, but we still need signs on the doors. What I got out of Mark’s post was how import­ant the effect­ive­ness of what the signs com­mu­nic­ate is and how that relates to how we label links etc. in web sites. No one wants a site with every link com­prised of just non-breaking-spaces. 

    As a side note, your ana­logy could be quite effect­ive in help­ing someone see the import­ance of the lay­out of a site. If the loc­a­tion of things on the page are read­ily obvi­ous, and clearly labeled, users will find them much more eas­ily and quickly.

  13. Waylan said on: May 27th, 2005 at 3:20 pm

    Hmm, I just re-read Josh’s com­ment and see he was really say­ing the same thing I did in his last para­graph. Sorry if I came across a little to aggress­ive there. 

    Oh, and Mark, I like the option to enable or dis­able the live pre­view, but when it’s enabled it takes forever for the char­ac­ters to appear here while typ­ing. I’ll type a entire sen­tence and only the first word is dis­played in the com­ment box. I then have to wait for the rest to appear one char­ac­ter at a time at less than half the speed of my rather slow typ­ing. I tried dis­abling the live pre­view, but it made no dif­fer­ence. Sure, the pre­view was no longer dis­played, but the delays con­tin­ued in the com­ment box. With this com­ment I have not enabled the Live Pre­view and things seem to work fine. Just thought you’d like to know.

  14. Mark Boulton said on: May 28th, 2005 at 5:45 pm

    Thanks Way­lan, Yeah I think there’s some prob­lems with the live pre­view and the way cer­tain browsers cope with the ren­der­ing. On Safari for example, as I am typ­ing this, the pre­view is work­ing fine — no lag, but I have exper­i­enced lag on some browsers in the past.

  15. Richard Thomas said on: May 31st, 2005 at 2:25 pm

    @Richard — I’m not from Amer­ica (but Canada) and we have some of the same signs, and like the stop sign, it’s more about the shape and the col­our in that situation.

    The yel­low is the cau­tion sign and some­times the text changes (but for us, the con­stuc­tions signs are an orange with the lil digger) 

    but like it was already said before, it’s more abotu the shape and col­our of the sign (or the graphic(s) on the sign)

  16. Andy Budd said on: June 4th, 2005 at 12:13 pm

    My favor­ite road sign has to be the UK round­about sign. 

    roundabout.jpg

    I think it’s a fant­astic example of good design through sub­trac­tion rather than addition.

    If I wanted to indic­ate the dir­ec­tion of travel around the round­about I prob­ably would have done some­thing obvi­ous like add dir­ec­tional arrows. 

    Instead the designer has simply removed a sec­tion of the round­about there­fore imply­ing the dir­ec­tion of travel without hav­ing to add visual clutter. 

    Genius.

  17. Jan Brasna said on: June 5th, 2005 at 1:04 am

    Andy Budd: Yep, I like also the sig­nage of the dir­ec­tion so I won’t for­get to ride it clok­wise when driv­ing in UK ;) …

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