Finding your way through Venice

Post date: Oct 31, 2017 5:17:21 PM

Venice might be a very difficult city to navigate because of the way it was designed (or wasn't), but the issue can often be exacerbated by confusing signage. Today, we did a few test runs of various observation sessions of tourists, looking at:

• 1. How people got through a crowded area with several signs present that pointed toward Ponte Rialto/San Marco and the train station/Piazzale Roma. Using clickers, we specifically found if they:

     1. Used physical maps or guidebooks

     2. Used their phone

     3. Used signs

     4. Used nothing

  2. Tourist groups, how to ID them, and how many people were in them.

  3. How easy it was to navigate to St. Mark's Square using signs, starting from a random location.

For the 3rd part, here's what we saw:

Some signs were easy to see and understand:

However, there were several points were there should have been an additional sign, but there were weren't. We recorded the coordinates of these locations.

Not all signs are created equal...some are hard to see because of poor design choices or placement:

And some signs were confusing because of multiple arrows or because they were 'home-made.'

This "sign" was the perfect storm of every possible bad sign attribute.