Wayfinding: Design That Guides Navigation Of Spaces

Our stylistic inspiration is from the subtle directions that keep people on course and on schedule

We’ve been fortunate to have excellent designers involved in There.App since founding. These talented people have enthusiastically adopted and built on each other’s work. Strong origins were established by our initial designer Jessica Miller‘s user persona research, brand styling and interface conceptualization, which continue providing foundation for us. One of her lasting contributions has been our styling inspiration from the concept of wayfinding.

That word may not be familiar (it wasn’t to me before being introduced by Jessica), but the concept is very recognizable. I particularly associate with the circular labels for subway routes and lines in matching colors with gradual curves imposed over maps of New York City that guided me down to Astor Place for trendy haircuts when I was a teenager. Another manifestation of wayfinding is the “You are here” arrow pointing at a dot on campus maps. With a little effort to orient within the actual spaces around me, I find those dots foolproof for getting me to head in the right direction.

The arrow and dot combination is actually the basis of There.App Co logo. We aspire to similar value proposition of our users efficiently getting to the right place, literally and figuratively, while allowing them to focus on what’s most important, and also enhancing their experiences including with nice design.

As an app for working on location, with prominent incorporation of map views, wayfinding is a sensible design basis for us. And it gets deeper. Here are ways that the principles of wayfinding align with our There.App efforts:

Legibility & Accessibility
In a lot of There.App projects, collaborators haven’t worked together before, and some learn about the app just as they show up on-site. There’s little patience to access and figure out some unfamiliar resource, so the pressure’s on us to prove valuable right away. Our priorities include immediate onboarding that minimizes overhead from steps to set up passwords or even requiring when the app be downloaded (works perfectly fine in a phone’s (or computer’s) browser), instant presentation of the most important project details, and clear organization of information in familiar motifs whether that may apply to the project’s lay-of-the-land, a teammate’s contact information, the day’s schedule, or listing out the most important responsibilities people have. We distill what’s presented to just what’s necessary for understanding, and we fluidly connect info so that it’s clear and easy how to go from seeing what activities are happening in a particular place, to who’s involved in those activities, to how to connect live with those people. Because these people may be new acquaintances, we consider context to determine what to present about them whether that’s full name, what to call them, easily incorporated profile photo, and/or description that may include job title or role in project. Just like practically anyone can look at a big letter or number in a circle can comprehend the identity of a subway line (“6”, “R” etc.), we try to be an effortless, almost un-noticed, source of what people need to know and do for project success.

Identity (of ‘locations’)
We are all about literally navigating physical spaces related to a project, but also, figuratively, there are the spaces within our app. This can relate to functional modules within projects, or items of that module (i.e. the particular calendar appointments within a project’s EVENTS module), or different projects within an account, or different accounts in which a user may have project memberships. We prioritize each of those being accessible with concise names and identifying visuals. For example our module names are all six letters or less (hence “EVENTS” instead of “calendar”, “schedule” or “appointments”) with an easily recognizable icon (like depiction of a wall calendar page) that tends to be consistent with people’s overall experiences using software and/or in physical activities. These words and images are paired throughout There.App so that their meanings reinforce each other and users can quickly surmise where they are within a project and what capabilities are available.

Consistency
The main alternative to using There.App to organize projects is some combination of sharing documents and implementing various apps for live communications, tracking accomplishments and more. This makes execution vulnerable to inefficiency, info getting out-dated and purposeful distractions woven into various apps. We aspire to provide a focused environment for all aspects of accessing a particular project's information, live team communication and on-site execution. Delivering utility across that breadth is a challenge. We’re diligent about paring information down to a consistent set of essential aspects whether it relates to a task, chat or photo etc. In any of the respective modules, items are listed in same scale and basic structure, but also with contextual distinctions. For example the available action on the right side of a listed task is to check it as completed, while in the same place for a listed photo or other media item it’s to see full-screen, rich presentation of the media. This consistent construction in turn avails richly fluid functionality, like ability to chat a photo, or highlight the project’s key contact person on top of a board, with clear and consistent presentation across such scenarios.

Aesthetics
Wayfinding has a distinctive look. Integrating information into places, often culturally important places, should complement, and not distract from the spatial experience. Wayfinding tends to be restrained in selection of just a few distinctive colors and geometries that are both notable to effectively inform within the overall environment, and at same time pleasantly blended into them. Our app design has related minimalism in the consistency of structure, and principal limitation to a few basic icons and colors: black font for important information (bolded or larger font if very important) versus grayer tones and sometimes italics for less important, and use of blue to indicate what can be tapped or clicked to take actions. Part of the motivation is for our presentation of app data and functionality to blend into an environment in which project managers can drive the overall aesthetics and messaging, including capabilities to determine project-wide cover imagery, logo placement, color theming, so what we insert within There.App projects gracefully serves those environmental considerations just like wayfinding signage serves their settings.

(guide a) Journey
Projects and journeys have multiple similarities. They have starts, stages, milestones and completions. And when projects effectively occur over literal journeys, involving travel, as is often the case in the sort of on-location teamwork There.App supports, the parallel lines actually converge. Work around particular places may have to accommodate individuals’ transportation plans and abide by detailed timelines of expensive field-based production and operations efforts. It’s crucial to be on-schedule, on-budget, on-site with precision, and on-point with quality results. There.App is a comprehensive solution across all of these considerations with our modular suite approach that combines multiple sorts of content organization and functionality, while focus intensively remains on priorities of  the project at hand. This focus is enhanced by capacity to combine and organize content across our various modules, like building a multifaceted page in the BOARD module in order to orient teams within a project, or messaging actionable items of any type through CHAT (can chat someone a task, and recipient can check it as complete from within the chat). There.App avails multiple ways for technical and personally crafted guidance to direct on-location projects towards their more metaphorical destinations. We aspire to meet the standards of our arrow-at-dot logo in terms of clearly guiding goal-oriented teams to project success.