When you are lost and desperately need to get some sense of your bearings as a pedestrian, in order to re-focus and re-plan your route, there can be nothing better than the sight of a ‘You are here’ map.
Finally, we can work out where we are and where we need to go, especially when navigating an urban area with which we are unfamiliar. ‘You are here’ (YAH) maps though are not always straightforward to use and there are some issues with them which we will discuss below.
Table of Contents
Information overload
One of the main problems with YAH maps is that they tend very often to provide a lot of information and this information becomes lost once you leave the spot where the YAH map is located.
The map might, for example, detail a whole city centre area or a whole attraction.
This is good for understanding your present location and getting a sense of where you need to go and the distances involved.
It is not so good though once you move away from this travel signage, because once you are no longer near to the sign, unless you can remember the whole map and masses of information, you might find that you are soon lost again.
Placement
The other main issue is that it can sometimes be difficult to fully understand the direction in which you are facing and should go.
The issue of placement is important in this discourse in that directionally, the way which the YAH map is facing when it has been constructed can completely change the set of directions and route finding.
Take the map below for example, which is from INSIDE the train station at Porto train station, in Portugal.
As you look at the map and try to pinpoint where you are and try and pick out landmarks that are on the map, with what you can see with your eyes, it is impossible.
Why? because the map is placed inside the train station indoors and you thus cannot use an aerial view approach to scan what is in front of you to make much more sense of the YAH map.
There is logic in placing the map inside in one sense, in that arriving train passengers have a map to consult before moving outside of the train station.
But in reality, having the YAH map outside of the station would be much more logical.
With so much information on the YAH map, cognitive mapping by the user (linking in information from the map with what they can see in person visually) becomes important with these types of maps, so that the maps can be made sense of.
As you can begin to see, these maps can be incredibly useful but they also have a limited benefit unless used correctly.
If the map is referring to an outdoor environment then the map should be placed outdoors. If the map is for indoor use, such as in a shopping mall or an indoor tourist attraction, then certainly, of course, the YAH map should be also indoors.
The placement of these signs should also ideally be positioned in a location where many people as possible can benefit from the signs and where several people can view the sign at once.
Where am I
It does also help if the map, which is designed to tell you where you yourself physically are, actually also clearly lets you see on the map your own position.
This seems such an obvious statement, yet it is surprising how often such maps do not easily highlight the present location.
The user of YAH maps can often be stressed and agitated just using the map to actually find where they are on the map itself. This is very often a problem in shopping mall YAH maps.
University campuses can also be one of the worst offenders when it comes to YAH maps, accentuated by the fact that so many of the buildings are similar looking for the visitor, as opposed to often more distinguishable buildings in a tourist attraction of the urban area.
On a recent visit to the University of Surrey, England, for example, on entering their modern campus where a lot of You are Here signs exist and where an effort at least seems to have been made to provide directions around the massive grounds, the maps did not stop me from getting lost (and I have a self-proclaimed good sense of direction normally).
The maps were confusing, despite being new, and the sameness of all of the buildings was a key part of the problem.
No effort seems to have been made to use some form of colour coding to distinguish the different blocks.
The map below is from a university campus in Wales and some form of colour coding is used to distinguish the parking areas but the ‘You are here’ position is not so easy to see i.e. it is not signified in red to make it instantly obvious. The map does though provide an interesting angular look at the campus.
Technology
The reality, I would suggest, is that technology is the answer to many of the YAH map problems i.e. the problem of information overload and with the map being decreasingly useless once you walk away from it.
Being able to use mobile phones and tablets with SatNav-style pedestrian mapping is the answer.
Mapping technologies though still at the time of writing, suffer from the issue that a lot of indoor environments either cannot or have not yet been mapped. Several companies are battling to be at the forefront of indoor mapping and the idea of mapping indoor areas is still relatively new.
Once both indoor and outdoor areas can be fully mapped, then will we still need YAH maps?
The answer is still yes because not everyone always wants to walk around holding a phone or tablet everywhere they go to.
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a mapping technique that has been around for a few years now and Google is using this technology to offer us the chance to create what in effect is an indoor survey of the building in question.
Massive indoor tourist attractions and areas, such as large airports and themed hotels such as in Vegas, could find great use of these technologies.
It should be remembered though, that some tourist environments purposely avoid us having too many directions in their environment because the wayfinding is intended to be confusing in order to get us to spend.
A classic example is a casino hotel in Las Vegas, which does not really want us to leave and then end up in another casino in a different hotel.
They would prefer to push and guide you towards their own facilities and they are not about to give you straightforward direction to the exit (the exception here though is emergency signage).
For SLAM, Google seems to have now created a backpack that acts as a Cartographer (read more here).
You can also view the Google video below for a look at indoor mapping using smartphones – the answer I suspect to the YAH maps.
Smartphones and Indoor Mapping
