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

This 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.