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Designing for Patient Wayfinding is #phygital and #digitalfirst
It’s mind-boggling to see that the majority of hospitals are still stuck in 1988 when it comes to Patient Wayfinding...
Today's patients expect a retail-like experience, characterized by effective, personalized, and empathetic communication. In virtually every survey, patients consistently express the need for better information regarding the physical patient journey.
The 3 Main Reasons Why ‘AR Wayfinding’ Won’t Work in Hospitals (today).
AR wayfinding is a total hype, just like Blue Dot indoor navigation was in 2014. With the combination of platforms like PTC Vuforia, Unity, Mapbox, Matterport, ARKit, etc., creating a simple AR wayfinding application is easy. Social Media is full of mockups, demos, and even some real-life deployments of AR wayfinding. Admittedly, it looks impressive, but supporting wayfinding is more than just projecting a few AR elements on a straightforward path.
Why Most Digital Indoor Wayfinding Tools Fall Short in Hospitals
How well someone can navigate a building depends largely on their knowledge of the space. This spatial knowledge can be categorized into three types: knowledge of a specific point in space (e.g., the destination), route knowledge (the path from their current location to the destination), and survey knowledge, which involves understanding the overall layout of the environment (Wiener, 2009).
When designing tools to help people navigate, you are essentially addressing a "spatial knowledge deficit." Only by understanding and mitigating this deficit can you create effective navigation solutions. This requires a deep understanding of the spatial cognitive processes involved in wayfinding.
Creating Effective Wayfinding Tools Requires Understanding of Spatial Cognition
Wayfinding is a complex process. We need to understand the underlying cognitive processes in order to create the right tools to help people navigate unfamiliar environments in a simple and effective way. Often, we develop solutions that address a non-existent problem because we do not fully grasp where the true wayfinding issue lies. We will illustrate this with an example: finding your way in a supermarket or a DIY store.
15 Common Mistakes / Blunders in Wayfinding Design in Healthcare
ince there are hardly any opportunities to test wayfinding design as a system within a hospital, innovation is slow.
This means we keep making the same mistakes, because if you do what you always did, you'll get what you always got.
When you see paperwork, you can be sure something is wrong. But if you look closer and notice the following things, you know something isn’t right either. 😊
How to Select the Right Digital Wayfinding System for Your Patients
We regularly engage in discussions with hospitals that have recently discovered the added value of digital wayfinding.
Once a hospital has gathered internal support to seriously explore the implementation of a mobile wayfinding system, the real search begins. People have seen all sorts of claims on social media, making it difficult to make the right decisions. So, what should you be looking for, and how do you make proper comparisons?
Accessibility Manager, the Critical Need for Better Hospital Wayfinding
Patient wayfinding consistently ranks as number six on the priority list, year after year. Action is only taken when things get out of hand.
The issue is that it's not a visibly urgent problem – there's no 'blood flowing through the streets'. It's hard to measure the exact costs associated with compromised patient wayfinding, making it easy to turn a blind eye. Yet, it's estimated to amount to hundreds of thousands annually (Zimring, 1990).
Confusing Terminology and Patient Wayfinding
Confusing terminology is one of the reasons why people get lost in hospitals (Mollerup, 2009). There are ways to reduce complexity, but somehow we manage to stir in new ones…
Exploring Bicycle Navigation Techniques in Hospital Settings
Sometimes I wonder if we should try something completely new to guide patients through hospitals using signage. Look at how wayfinding for recreational cyclists works in the Netherlands, for example. All cycling paths are modeled as a network with nodes and connections between them. This makes it incredibly easy for people to find their way.
In a hospital organization, where should Wayfinding be incorporated?
Wayfinding is a complex challenge as it involves many different areas, not only in research but also in daily operations. Which hospital department is best suited to embed Wayfinding ?Wayfinding Design is an interdisciplinary field that draws on various areas such as cognitive science, neuro psychology, architecture, industrial design engineering, HCI, computer science, and mathematics to enhance its design.We also see hospital organizations often struggle to embed Wayfinding in their departments as it works cross-functionally. 𝙒𝙝𝙤 𝙣𝙚𝙚𝙙𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙙?