Directional Signage Research Articles

Optimizing Tourist Visits through Digital Tourism Socialization Campaign at Watubangga Beach Tourism Destination

Tourism is a crucial economic sector in regional development, including Watubangga Beach, Southeast Sulawesi. Despite its significant potential, efforts to market and promote this destination have yet to be optimal in attracting tourists. This project aims to leverage digital technology to enhance the appeal of Watubangga Beach, aiming to provide substantial benefits to both the local community and visitors. Methods employed include field observations, interviews with tourism managers, establishment of social media accounts, mapping the location on Google Maps, providing entrance tickets and tourism brochures, coastal area cleanup, and installation of directional signage. This article discusses digital-based tourism promotion strategies to increase visitor numbers to Watubangga Beach. By maintaining cleanliness, utilizing social media, and actively involving tourists, it is hoped to create satisfying tourist experiences. The digital marketing strategies are expected to directly benefit tourism managers by boosting visitor numbers and advancing tourism at Watubangga Beach.

Perancangan Signage Kawasan Wisata Pantai Sanur di Kota Denpasar

Sanur Beach is one of the tourist areas known as the sunrise beach due to its location in the east of the island of Bali. This beach is the right location for domestic and foreign tourists to carry out various activities such as relaxing, swimming, or canoeing. The increasing popularity of Sanur Beach is unfortunately not accompanied by an increase in signage facilities where the existing signage is still inadequate. The purpose of this design is to create typical signage of the Sanur Beach Tourism Area to improve the quality of tourist visits and make it easier for tourists to get information in yet visual communication. The method used to obtain and analyze the data in this design is a qualitative method consisting of natural observation, depth interview, and user persona. The signage concept design produced in the design includes materials, colors, fonts, and design styles that are adjusted to the impression presented by the Sanur Beach environment, which contains elements of refreshing, natural, and fun. The output of this design includes digital visualization of identification signage, directional signage, orientation signage, and regulatory signage in the Sanur Beach Tourism Area. The results of the design are expected to provide convenience for visitors to visit tourist objects and improve the quality of visits from visitors. Keywords - sanur beach, signage, tourism

Preferensi Pengguna Gang Terhadap Peletakan Signage Sebagai Respons Terhadap Pandemi COVID-19 di Kampung Sekayu Kota Semarang

Public spaces need to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic by supporting the implementation of health protocols, so they do not become places for the virus to spread. Alleys in urban kampung as public spaces are undoubtedly prone to spread the virus. The narrow width of the alley makes it difficult for people to implement health protocols like the alleys in Kampung Sekayu in Semarang, which have not shown any adaptation. Signage has not been used to remind the implementation of health protocols. The research aims to find and recognize the placement of signage elements to help the implementation of health protocols in the alleys in Kampung Sekayu. This research method is quantitative with quantitative descriptive analysis techniques. The results of this study are directional signage is placed on the side of the alleyway adjacent to the fence of the surrounding house, identification and information signage are placed on the side of the alleyway which is not adjacent to the fence of the surrounding house. Directional signage is placed on the inside of the alley intersection, identification and information signage are placed on the outside of the alley intersection.

Directional and Wayfinding Signage for Takoradi Technical University (Akatakyi Campus)

The paper intended to look for more convenient technology to produce a signage that will create awareness of the new Akatakyi campus of the Takoradi Technical University and also provide functional and efficient direction to people. The research specifically sought to identify suitable landmarks and locations for mounting specific types of signage and directional signs for effective communication at the Akatakyi campus of the Takoradi Technical University. The vibrant growth of the university and the increasing number of the students over the past years has therefore rendered the Effia campus congested hence overstretching the facilities for the university. As a result, the management has acquired one hundred and fifty acres of land for the expansion of the university at the Akatakyi-Ahanta community a suburb of Takoradi to ease congestion on the main campus. The newly Akatakyi campus is intended to accommodate the Faculty of Engineering. It has been observed that most people are not familiar with the location and the program intended to be run at the Akatakyi campus of the university. It is therefore imperative to find ways of creating awareness of the new campus. The descriptive research method was used in the study to identify, describe and document all the data collected. The instruments used in gathering data were conversation, observation and interview. The outcome shows an excellent procedural model with illustrations. It is recommended that the management of Takoradi Technical University management should engaged the researcher and finance this project for the execution of the actual and the standardized sizes. This will help visitors all day to reduce stress hence, to located TTU facilities at ease within Akatakyi campus.

Covid-19 Responsive Public Space Signage Design for Children from Physical Distancing Aspects at Lapangan Merdeka, Pematangsiantar

Abstract. Adaptation of public space users requires COVID 19 responsive design elements to support public health, especially for children aged 7-12 years who are classified as vulnerable and still need public space to play and socialize. The Lapangan Merdeka area is a public open space where children make up about 60% of visitors. Currently, there is still negligence in the application of health protocols. This study considers design requirements in implementing physical distancing, such as signage aspects. The quantitative method is used in this research. The analysis stages consisted of identifying the child's characteristics through behavior-setting and place-setting; and formulating design element needs through signage aspects such as directional signage, informative signage, and identification signage. The research result shows three-element of signage. First is directional signage, such as a circulation regulation on the surfaces of the jogging track. It is used for the signing facility on the jogging track. It uses a board stuck in the ground and is placed in the area leading to the field, and uses an information board with 1-1.5 meters on the jogging track. Second, informative signage such as an x-banner at all facility points. Third, identification signage such as a board containing an area plan and placed near the words "Lapangan Merdeka."

Feeling a historic city: Porto landscape through the eyes of residents and visitors

PurposeThis paper aims to monitor the urban landscape through the perceptions of residents and visitors, identifying features that cause visual impacts and providing insights for landscape management decision-makers. Captured impressions about the city whilst moving around are important to assess the satisfaction of city residents and city visitors through key elements, such as directional signage, outdoor advertising, restaurants’ outdoor terrace furniture, urban furniture, green spaces, traffic, cleaning, pedestrian areas, visitor flow and conservation of monuments, museums and buildings.Design/methodology/approachA survey was applied in the historical Porto city centre (Portugal) to understand residents’ and visitors’ perceptions of the city landscape and assess the differences between these two groups. Cronbach’s alpha was used to assess the reliability of the constructs (dimensions) of urban landscape. Non-parametric Mann-Whitney test was used to find significant differences in the perceptions of residents and visitors.FindingsThe results suggest significant differences in the perceptions. Residents value more two constructs of the landscape (heritage conservation and transport mobility) whilst visitors value more other two (pedestrian mobility and aesthetic quality). It is showed that residents have a strong sense of place and are concerned with the conservation of historical heritage. Visitors are more concerned with dimensions intrinsically related to tourism.Originality/valueThis research allowed to fill a gap found in the literature, namely, the importance of considering the perceptions of different actors in the urban landscape monitoring. These results are an important contribution for local authorities to understand the value of urban landscape elements from the perspective of residents and visitors. This study opened the possibility of comparing the results from different historical cities centres.

Let eyes tell: experimental research on university library signage system and users' wayfinding behavior

PurposeWayfinding efficiency is an extremely influential factor to improve users' library interior experience. However, few research has studied the different functions of various wayfinding signages for university library users through mobile visual experiment. To fill this gap, the purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between university library signage system design and patrons' wayfinding behavior features.Design/methodology/approachIn this article, an eye movement tracking method was introduced to record eye movement data during the wayfinding process of participants in the library interior, targeting the cognition and psychology of library users in the wayfinding signage system. The visual guiding usability of landmarks, informational signages and directional signages were quantitatively tested, and the fixation on the signage system between orientation strategy users and route strategy users was compared. This study also investigated the effects of library users' spatial anxiety and environmental familiarity on their fixation on the area of interest of the wayfinding signage system using the differential test and regression.FindingsThis paper observed that informational signage had the best visual navigating competence. The difference of fixation duration and searching duration between patrons used various wayfinding strategies was significant. The informational signage was most attended by the route strategy users, and the orientation strategy users rarely focused on the directional signage. And participants with high anxiety tended to ignore the visually auxiliary function of the landmarks but paid attention to the directional signage. The participants with low anxiety could capture the landmarks that could not be easily found by the route strategy users. And participants less familiar with the environment were more sensitive to the landmarks. Furthermore, this paper offers optimization measures for university library wayfinding signage system, from the perspectives of informational signage understandability improvement, directional signage physical specification design and wayfinding assistant system with automatic landmark technology.Originality/valueThis article adds to the relatively sparse literature on university library user wayfinding experimental study in China. The experimental findings of this paper also have important practical implications for academic libraries' wayfinding system evaluation. The whole process could be seen as a repeatable and standard framework and methodology to inspect university library's wayfinding signage system usability and user wayfinding behavior performance.

Directional Signage Location Optimization of Subway Station Based on Big Data

The imperfection of the guide signs in the subway will lead to many difficulties for passengers, which directly affects the operation efficiency of subway stations. In this paper, we use big data to analyze the problem of signages in Beijing subway, and propose the optimization model of signages in subway stations based on particle swarm optimization algorithm. The experimental results of Dongzhimen subway station in Beijing show that the model has strong robustness in optimization, and the global best position can be found 100%.

Measuring the effectiveness of first service encounter in public transportation: An Empirical Investigation

Platform is crucial interface between commuters and public transport organisation as maximum service encounter occurs at platform. Platform services are neglected area of the research although it set the expectation of customers, gives the clue and creates the first impression about the service quality of public transport services. This study is part of comprehensive research project which was carried out to measure perception of commuters regarding effectiveness of different kinds of services delivered by Delhi Metro. In the present study, total 1,015 samples were taken from all the 160 metro stations using survey method. Qualitative research technique was used for extraction of the variables while multivariate regression analysis was employed to process the data. The result of the study depicts that updated information, the number of directional signage and cleanliness has the most significant impact on customer satisfaction while medical facility on the platform is a least important factor.

An intelligent indoor positioning system based on pedestrian directional signage object detection: a case study of Taipei Main Station.

Indoor positioning technologies have gained great interest from both industry and academia. Variety of services and applications can be built based on the availability and accessibility of indoor positioning information, for example indoor navigation and various location-based services. Different approaches have been proposed to provide indoor positioning information to users, in which an underlying system infrastructure is usually assumed to be well deployed in advance to provide the position information to users. Among many others, one common strategy is to deploy a bunch of active sensor nodes, such as WiFi APs and Bluetooth transceivers, to the indoor environment to serve as reference landmarks. The user's current location can thus be obtained directly or indirectly according to the active sensor signals collected by the user. Different from conventional infrastructure-based approaches, which put additional sensor devices to the environment, we utilize available objects in the environment as location landmarks. Leveraging wildly available smartphone devices as customer premises equipment to the user and the cutting-edge deep-learning technology, we investigate the feasibility of an infrastructure-free intelligent indoor positioning system based on visual information only. The proposed scheme has been verified by a real case study, which is to provide indoor positioning information to users in Taipei Main Station, one of the busiest transportation stations in the world. We use available pedestrian directional signage as location landmarks, which include all of the 52 pedestrian directional signs in the testing area. The Google Objection Detection framework is applied for detection and recognition of the pedestrian directional sign. According to the experimental results, we have shown that the proposed scheme can achieve as high as 98% accuracy to successfully identify the 52 pedestrian directional signs for the three test data sets which include 6,341 test images totally. Detailed discussions of the system design and the experiments are also presented in the paper.

Signage Versus Environmental Affordances: Is the Explicit Information Strong Enough to Guide Human Behavior During a Wayfinding Task?

AbstractThis study aims to explore how people behave when they have to find a location within a complex building and are confronted with situations where directional signage (i.e., explicit information) is in opposition to environmental affordances that naturally direct users towards a specific path, creating a situation with conflicting information (e.g., a brighter corridor vs. a darker corridor but with a directional sign indicating to follow the darker one). A virtual reality–based methodology was used and a between‐subject design was considered. Thus, participants were given the tasks of finding three publicly accessible central points in a virtual hotel and confronted with a two forced‐choice task of local scenes in which environmental variables (i.e., corridor width and brightness) and signage varied systematically, in two experimental conditions (i.e., neutral and signage). For the signage condition, signs were inserted to explicitly point in the opposite direction than that implicitly suggested by the environmental affordances, creating situations with conflicting information. Results indicate that environmental variables were able to direct people indoors acting as environmental affordances. Users preferred to follow the wider and brighter paths. However, when directional signage pointed in the opposite direction of the paths preferred by the participants, most of them complied with signage.

Designing and managing interpretive experiences at religious sites: Visitors' perceptions of Canterbury Cathedral

Tourism to religious sites is growing worldwide, yet our understanding of the motives, interests and needs of tourists at these sites is limited. Research in British cathedrals suggests that many regard religious sites as leisure or recreational attractions and correspondingly, seek interpretation of the secular as well as spiritual aspects. This study surveyed 233 tourists at Canterbury Cathedral in the UK and found that tourists felt it was important to provide directional signage, displays and exhibits, value for money, attendants and equal access at the site. Overall, respondents rated their experiences positively, but wanted more information on the cathedral's history, architecture and artwork, as well as stories regarding people connected with the site. Recommendations for improving interpretation at Canterbury Cathedral are presented, and implications for the design of interpretive experiences at this and other religious sites discussed.

Strategies and Challenges of Tourist Facilities Management in the World Heritage Site: Case of the Maritime Greenwich, London

the World Heritage Site status is transforming into a highly priced honor in terms of destination branding and attracting diversified types of tourists. this study is based on the opinions of these tourists at Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site (MGWHS). the first objective is to identify these tourists' satisfaction with existing facilities and their management. the second objective is to find out any lack of facilities and to suggest ways of overcoming this. Following the qualitative research method, this explanatory case study depends on primary data collection through semistructured interviews. the results exhibit a gap between perception and expectation of the tourists. the results also demonstrate the need for recuperating the building and management of tourist facilities without disturbing the architectural and natural aesthetics. Areas identified for attention include the sanitation, resting places, catering, facilities for the disabled or parents with infants, and the multilingual directional signage.

Using Signage to Promote Stair Use on a University Campus in Hidden and Visible Stairwells

This study tested the effectiveness of a stair use promotion strategy in visible and hidden stairwells during intervention and post intervention follow up. A quasi-experimental study design was used with a 1 week baseline, a 3 week intervention, and post intervention at 2 and 4 weeks in 4 university buildings in San Antonio, Texas with stairwells varying in visibility. Participants were students, faculty, staff, and visitors to the 4 buildings. A total of 8431 observations were made. The intervention incorporated motivational signs with direction to nearby stairwells placed by elevators to promote stair use. Stair and elevator use was directly observed and recorded. Logistic regression analyses were used to test whether stair versus elevator use varied by intervention phase and stairwell visibility. Stair use increased significantly (12% units) during the intervention period and remained above baseline levels during post intervention follow-up. At baseline, visible stairs were 4 times more likely to be used than hidden stairs; however, the increase in stair use during intervention was similar in both types of stairwells. Motivational and directional signage can significantly increase stair use on a university campus. Furthermore, stairwell visibility is an important aspect of stair use promotion.

Using Signage to Promote Stair Use on a University Campus

The American College of Sports Medicine recommends regular participation in moderate to vigorous physical activity for all adults. However, the majority of the population does not meet these recommendations. Stair use is one recommended method of accumulating regular moderate physical activity. PURPOSE: To determine the effectiveness of a stair use promotion strategy in visible and hidden stairwells on a university campus. METHODS: Motivational and directional signs were placed near elevators in four university buildings for a three-week intervention. Observations (n=8,433) were made of stair and elevator use for one week prior, during the intervention and at two and four weeks post intervention. Logistic regression analyses were used to test whether stair versus elevator use varied by intervention phase and stairwell visibility. RESULTS: Stair use increased significantly (12% from 35.5% baseline) during the intervention period (OR 1.65, 95% CI 1.47-1.85; p < .001) and remained elevated at week two (OR 1.37, 95% CI 1.19-1.59) and week four (OR 1.75, 95% CI 1.51-2.03) after the intervention signs were removed, at 7.6% and 13.4% respectively. The increase in stair use during the intervention was similar in hidden and visible stairwells. During all phases of the study, participants were more likely to use visible stairs (OR 4.68, 95% CI 4.19-5.21). However, the interaction between visibility and study phases was not significant (χ2(1) = 1.26, p = 0.74), suggesting a comparable increase in use of hidden and visible stairwells at each study phase. CONCLUSIONS: Motivational and directional signage can significantly increase stair use on a university campus. Furthermore, stairwell visibility is an important aspect of stair use promotion.

EXPLORING ISSUES AND STRATEGIES OF DEVELOPING SKYWAY SYSTEMS: A CASE STUDY OF THE TAIPEI SHIN-YI DISTRICT

In an urban setting, the development of a skyway system has been seen as an important facility to improve local environment, create the urban image, and enhance the prosperity of the area. Furthermore, skyways can offer vantage points for pedestrians to observe the city and enjoy the unique view of the urban streetscape. This paper therefore argues that skyway systems are capable of forming a vibrant element in an urban context. As the development of skyway systems has recently become a notice in Taiwan, this paper selects the skyway system in the Shin-Yi Planning District, Taipei City as the subject of the research and conducts on-site observations and the questionnaire survey. The survey result shows that the majority of the respondents are content with the skyway system as a whole. However, several issues such as the lack of directional signage, deficient protection from the elements, and incomplete connection with public transit require more discussions in the subsequent skyway development. To build a sustainable skyway system, planners should pay much attention to the three critical strategies—integrating with the public transit system, providing a pedestrian-friendly environment, and enhancing the urban image and landscapes—in their skyway plans.

Attendees’ needs and service priorities in a large convention center: Application of the importance–performance theory

The study identified attendees’ needs and service priorities when attending an exhibition at a large convention center. Data was collected using self-administered questionnaires from 566 subjects attending five different exhibitions. The results indicated that overall cleanliness of the convention center, a well-maintained facility, and helpfulness of guest services personnel were top priorities for attendees regarding the convention center's facility services. Attendees also attributed high importance to the following features of the convention facility: directional signage within the convention center, availability of high quality lodging near the convention center, sufficient restrooms throughout the facility, and ability to get cell phone signal. Furthermore, statistically significant differences were found between the level of importance and performance of the majority of the facility services and features of the convention center. Implications for decision makers regarding these importance–performance gaps are discussed.

Experimental Evaluation of Exit Directional Indicators

The direction to a safe exit is a critical message to convey in built environments. As pictorial signs have been increasingly used, many exit symbols have been used or proposed, but none has been shown to be both well understood and optimally visible under potential emergency conditions. This report focuses on a narrower issue which parallels the exit symbol problem in general: that is, the selection of a directional indicator, or “arrow”, for use with exit signage. In one experiment, a set of arrows was tested for visibility under simulated emergency viewing conditions. In another experiment, arrows were evaluated for suitability on the basis of connotative meaning, uniqueness, and appropriateness of appearance. One arrow was identified as the preferred candidate among the set tested, and some general features were identified for use in selecting exit directional signage.