OUGD601 COP: INITIAL WAY FINDING EXPERIMENTS

Aims of way finding:
To make the shopping experience more interactive and fun for children
To help adults navigate the store better through colour coded floor vinyl way finding
To teach children about colours/shapes/foods

What it's testing:
The navigability model of interaction - can parents navigate the store?
The play for learning model - can way finding be used to teach children?
The consistency model of interaction - the way finding should be consistent throughout the store
The physical model of play - children should interact with the way finding in a physical way, developing fine and gross motor skills

These are initial sketches for the content of the floor vinyl stickers, experimenting with different kinds of imagery. Initially I experimented with feet, so children can match their feet up to the right size on the floor. I also tried a road idea, so children could run their car toys along the road, or pretend they are a car zooming through the isles. I also tried a fruit and veg silhouette idea, which could direct people more visually to the right section. This idea could also teach children to guess the names of the food products. The final idea was taken from a brief I did from Extended Practice, which included some round people. The idea was for these people to be different colours signalling different sections of the supermarket, so you could follow different characters through the supermarket.

Considerations:
As these floor designs are going to be produced using vinyl, you can only use block colours, and you can't use gradients to transition from one colour to another, so this limits the possibilities for some of the designs. For example in the foot print idea, you could only have the background one colour, otherwise you'd have a line where one starts and another finishes.

Vector images were created for the fruit and veg section vinyl, making sure the images are clean and simple.

The ideas sketched were transformed to digital ideas, which gives a lot more idea if they will work or not. For instance, the road idea alone looks too simple, it's not engaging enough. However the fruit and veg and foot print ideas are really quite engaging as there is more detail and content to them.

The people idea was also experimented with, experimenting more with actual printed stickers as opposed to vinyl stickers, to allow for more colour options (but lowered durability). It was experimented to have a girl and boy together, so that children won't be able to make a fuss about going with a girl or a boy alone, as children can be funny about the opposite sex. Experimentation was also put in on how to make them more simple, such as only including their facial details and hair (but then they looked naked), only their facial details but not the females eye lashes, which did look better but then they looked like egg people. Trying this version in different colours to match the way finding resolved the egg person look, however now they looked like weird aliens with only the eyes standing out. Removing all features and only including the silhouette was a lot more effective, and simple as well which is important to way finding. These simple people were applied to the road idea, as this could look like they are walking in a certain direction which would make following them to your section of the supermarket easier and clearer. However it proved confusing in arranging the people to go in the right direction on the right side of the road.