Facilitating wayfinding with signage systems
How can information theory help us to design signage systems to improve wayfinding performance and user experience? Find out in the paper by Rohit Dubey and co-authors published in Cognitive Computation.
Signage systems are crucial in conveying information that is essential for people to find their way in an environment filled with distractions. An effective signage system can improve the performance and user experience of wayfinding by reducing the perceived complexity of the setting. Previous models of sign-based wayfinding do not incorporate realistic distractions in the environment and also do not quantify the reduction in perceived complexity with the presence of wayfinding signage.
Using concepts of information theory, the team led by Rohit Kumar Dubey researcher of Cognition, Perception, and Behaviour in Urban Environments, Dr Tyler Thrash and Mubbasir Kapadia along with their co-authors, proposed and validated a new agent-signage interaction model that quantifies wayfinding information from relevant signs.
The researchers conducted two online crowd-sourcing experiments to calculate the distribution of a sign’s visibility and an agent’s decision-making confidence as a function of the observation angle and viewing distance. This model was then validated using a virtual reality (VR) experiment with trajectories from human participants.
The findings from this study serve as the initial step towards modelling human wayfinding behaviour using signage in complex and realistic environments. The article "external pageInformation Theoretic Model to Simulate Agent-Signage Interaction for Wayfinding" is published in Cognitive Computation.