Signage is a powerful influence. It's communication, and communication is an important thing. It's the foundation for our human interaction, from corporate communication with customers through to the personal 1-2-1 interaction.
Signs tend to generate action and importantly impression too. Sometimes those signs can be life savers, the illuminated fire exit sign for example, or the cliff edge side. More generally though they are a more positive call to action. They can be the first thing a person sees when physically finding a service and then using that service. It might not be until much later in that customer journey that a person meets an employee with their smart uniform and big smiles.
There's the well used adage "You do not get a second chance to make a first impression". And that impression is made quite quickly, typically within seconds (see Blink, Malcolm Gladwell). That first impression is the grounding from which everything else is subsequently benchmarked, and we're biassed towards looking for evidence to confirm that benchmark (it's subconscious and called "slicing"). Dirty welcome signs tend to be the worst culprit here (...so are the loos and kitchen dirty too?). It then takes relatively more effort to counter that initial benchmark even if the subsequent message is different.
In the world of web design there's what's called usability testing. Actually observing the behaviour of individuals as they interact, click by click with the web site. It's known to be a very frustrating thing to watch. Even when a site is up an running, there's a huge amount of data being collected behind the scenes which reveal very step of the user journey. However there's typically no equivalently easy insight in the physical and practical journey that we still rely on ion our day to day physical customer journeys.
Add to that a general lack of proactive desire for customers or users to share their impressions and experience. It usually has to be really bad and then that tends to come in the form of a complaint. There well may be some great positive feedback too. But there's a large middle ground which ranges from poor through acceptable and good which mostly goes unknown. Even when promoted people tend to be reluctant to share genuine feedback. That poor restaurant meal... when asked the loaded and closed question "Was everything OK?" (rather than "How was your meal?") there's a tendency to be provide a complaint "Yes".
So the real magic in signage is have a real and deep empathy with the user, so they are positively encouraged and even enlightened along every step of their journey. In short we're after relevant, sufficient and clear information which leads to positive action and impression.
So here we've compiled a selection of signs that explore all that, and provide a foundation, structure and practical case studies to enable great engaging comms.
