The Problem
About two months ago my team got relocated to a new building. My desk is in a great spot, we have fun new neighbors, and the new building is pretty comparable to the old one, with one big exception.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to remember where the conference rooms are.
Contributing Factors
The floor plan seems to have been designed by military strategists intent on confusing hostile invaders. There is a central atrium with windows that are indistinguishable from outside windows, and the interior spaces are configured to restrict any view to a relatively small area. This means the office feels more intimate and light, but it also means that it is very difficult to orient oneself. Views in every direction look pretty much the same.
To illustrate, the first photo below is of a main hallway just off the main entrance, and the second is of the view just inside the employee-only door adjacent to the main entrance:
Can you tell that these views are looking in exactly opposite directions?
By the way, none of the doors you can see in those photos are conference rooms. Adding to the degree of difficulty, our conference rooms are named like a particularly challenging game of Memory. The theme for our floor is vegetables, so here are a few of our conference room names: Tomato, Avocado, Potato, Turnip, Parsnip, Asparagus, and Tomato Sauce. They are not laid out alphabetically, they are not grouped in any meaningful way, and the big rooms are not even named after big vegetables.
After two months and a lot of meetings, I still get Parsnip and Turnip confused (among others), and when someone says we have a meeting in Carrot, I have NO CHANCE of finding it if I don’t look at the map. Nor am I alone – wander the hallways on any day (like, say, if you’re lost) and you’ll likely hear someone say, “Wait, where am I?” or “Which one was Cucumber?” or “Can I follow you there?”
My Process
For kicks, I decided to see if I could come find a way to make this situation better. I spent some time studying the map of our floor, which you can see below with all of the conference rooms highlighted in yellow.
I saw that they exist in much more predictable locations than I had realized. Every one lies either on the center atrium or along one of the four outside walls, which despite appearances from the inside are basically square. I then determined three main attributes that define a conference room–size, location in the building, and available equipment–and tried to come up with a new naming convention that would convey as much of that information as possible.
After a few iterations of names like ‘South 10 Teleconference,’ I realized that another key component is the ease of saying/typing the room name to another person. I re-focused on finding short, memorable names that somehow reference the rooms’ location in the building.
My Solution
Here is my proposal:
I named the rooms with some reference to the compass direction of the outside wall, or to the word “center” for the rooms on the atrium. In addition, I thought we could use this compass reference to help people orient themselves and build their own mental map of the interior. Perhaps we could hang signs from the ceiling:
Or we could try something more subtle:
I’m pretty sure these changes would drastically reduce the number of times I feel lost, and the few coworkers I’ve shared this with were excited enough that they asked me to take it to our facilities manager. But I wanted to share it with you and more of my coworkers to get some feedback first. So please let me know if you have any ideas, questions, or comments!
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
As someone who gets lost inside buildings very easily, I loved this post and your very practical approach to a solution. Naming conference rooms after vegetables seems well-intentioned (“let’s make it fun and quirky”) but totally misguided, especially when you have both Tomato and Tomato Sauce. Your proposed conference room names seem right on target: they’re short, memorable, and still have personality, plus they’re grounded in reality. I hope your facilities manager sees the logic in it.
Thanks, Amy! I’m hoping to get a little groundswell going before I take it to facilities. It looks like it shouldn’t be too hard – I just found this great piece of wayfinding hackery on someone’s cube this morning: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sgmitch/3874793187/.
Awesome little side project Sarah!
You should come hang out at Salesforce.com for a while. Between the 4 buildings we have in downtown San Francisco, spread over about a dozen floors, we have one scheme for conference rooms – they’re Hawaiian words. And, for added fun, some of our international offices have conference rooms with exactly the same names as local ones. Where’s the meeting? Pua, Pele, Poi…? Fun
Hah! That’s pretty funny, Ian. It’s interesting that it’s such a common issue, and yet there’s very little concern about making it better. I guess we’re all pretty motivated to find the room, so we get there eventually. Maybe it would be different if all meetings were optional. (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_50/b4013008.htm )
Hi Sarah,
Hope I’m not too late with suggestions, but here’s my point of view on your proposal.
It can be helpful to name the conference rooms, but as Amy pointed out if names to too alike you won’t remember. I would personally aim for a wider perspective than to add names and give directions to the names.
The most important issue with wayfinding is orientation, if you can orientate yourself within the structure of the environment you instantly know where to go, you can achieve this by adding ‘landmarks’ to the environment making it easier to know where you are. These landmarks can consist of images on the walls (related to your business), plants or even posters. Then add names to the conference rooms such as city names, make the city names relate to the orientation of the building, e.g. cities north of the building make them related to the northern conference rooms.
Hope this helps in make your environment more legible.
Please post the results and let us know how it worked out for you.
Best, Sander
Thanks, Sander – never too late for suggestions.
That’s a really interesting idea to make the interior space more like a country with landmarks and regions. My worry would be that people would need to know/remember where the cities are located in the real world in order to use that info in navigating the office. This requires an extra step of cognition and a common reference set of cities for everyone in the office. We have people from offices in other countries who work here occasionally, and they might not know where Minneapolis is, for example.
I like your idea of memorable landmarks. Those would probably be great together with the direction markers to help you know not only where you are, but how to get somewhere else. Unfortunately, facilities won’t let me rename the conference rooms at all, and I’m pretty sure they won’t let me put up murals or posters either.
Thanks again for the suggestions. I’ll have to keep trying to come up with hacks I can sneak below facilities’ radar. I’ll let you know if I implement anything!
Thanks for your feedback, good luck!