Wayfinding in the rain
Heavy rainstorms in Dallas-Fort Worth this week blocked the usual unobstructed view of this prairie metroplex — 9, 286 square miles in size or, according to Wikipedia, “roughly the size of New Hampshire.” Where ordinarily you see acres of tract housing, strip malls, and shopping centers and miles of streets, frontage roads, and highways, on Wednesday you saw sheets of rain blocking out the landscape and bouncing off the sidewalk.
Or so I surmise from The Dallas Morning News reports. From my limited perspective in my family’s home in Garland, Texas — among DFW’s 11 larger suburbs (pop. 222, 013, as of July 2009) –I saw the downpour, heard the thunder, and felt the fierce joy that storms bring out in me. I can’t help it. Storms are wild, beautiful, astonishing things.
I knew, of course, that the storm would likely cause accidents, injuries, property losses, and deaths. I knew, too, that family members would have to drive home from work in the storm, and that gave me pause. (My joy was fleeting but then restored when all returned safely home.)
Today the news has proved me right in that four storm-related deaths were reported statewide, and three people were reported missing. Two of the missing were swept away in the vehicles they were driving.
I don’t know the details of those accidents — whether limited visibility impeded the missing motorists’ ability to gauge road safety or whether inadequate road signage contributed to their doom. In any case, these are tragic losses.
I do know that wayfinding tools — used by architects, urban planners, and civil engineers to help people navigate the built environment, and by user-interface designers to help users navigate websites — are essential both to usable infrastructure (the real-world street and cityscape) and a usable virtual world.
The latter is my area of interest and investigation. If memory serves me, I first encountered the term “wayfinding” in a Human Factors International course titled “The Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design,” or else in Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web (Wodtke and Govella, 2009).
Wodtke and Govella explain that wayfinding lets people know where they are — not only through signage but through other visual cues.
In the DFW metroplex, there are few landmarks to orient drivers. On some streets, street names remain the same from one city to the next (e.g., Garland to Richardson), but east-west or north-south designations change. On others, street names change. Often, the thoroughfare itself changes; for example, the street becomes a road or a highway.
As a motorist, I find these changes maddening. I feel like I think Alice in Alice in Wonderland must have felt when she fell down the rabbit hole. I mean no criticism of DFW urban planners or to the makers of interactive maps (Google Maps and MapQuest). I am sure planners do the best they can to make DFW streets navigable and that map makers do their best to stay abreast of changes and update their products accordingly. I don’t yet have a global positioning system in my car, but I’ve heard from those who do that they’re not foolproof — you still need a map — whether driving in the rain or on a clear day.
As a website visitor, I find similar changes (e.g. a linked-to page has a name different from the link clicked to access it) almost as maddening. It depends on the context, of course. A slip-up on the web usually isn’t life-threatening. A slip-up while driving can be, as was the case in this week’s storm-related traffic accidents.