Everyday UI: CIT Floor Plan Diagrams
Outside the elevators on each of the five floors of the CIT are two floor plan diagrams that are meant to show interested individuals where they can find certain rooms on a given floor. While the interface is fairly intuitive, there are a number of improvements that could be made to it that would make the layout of the CIT more learnable.
First and foremost, users need to understand where exactly they are (and which direction they are facing) when they look at each of the diagrams on any given floor. Every one of these diagrams at the CIT indicates — roughly — where users are when they are looking at the diagram with a bold asterisk. As someone who has used these diagrams numerous times, I can safely say that the asterisk itself is often hard to find on the diagrams because it fails to stand out; it thereby renders the diagram less learnable and less memorable than it could be. Also, on any particular floor, the diagrams appear in slightly different locations, yet the asterisks that are meant to mark where the user is when they look at the diagrams appear in a somewhat arbitrary spot between the actual location of the two diagrams on any given floor; this is needlessly confusing but perhaps the designers of these diagrams did not know where exactly they would be placed when they designed them (maybe apart from the fact that they would be placed near the elevators on any given floor). Lastly, even if the asterisks were moved to a more exact location for each individual diagram, it still takes me longer than I feel it should to get my bearings and determine which direction is which when I look at these diagrams.
That said, I would strongly advocate replacing the asterisk with a red arrow pointing directly in the direction so as to mark the exact spot where it appears on any given floor. Ideally, text like “YOU” or “YOU ARE HERE” (as is often shown in similar diagrams at malls and the interiors of other large buildings) would also appear in red alongside these arrows. (Perhaps the original designer of these diagrams — which look quite dated at this point — did not actually have red ink for these diagrams, but that issue is one that could easily be solved with modern-day printing technology.) To make it even clearer which way is which on the diagram, each side of the building in the diagram could be marked with “NORTH,” “SOUTH,” “EAST,” and “WEST” as appropriate.
As noted on https://medium.com/@amelia_ohalloran/cit-user-experience-38ed0d4edf53, the fact that most of stairwells in the CIT do not actually connect all the floors in the building can be quite confusing to people who are not all that familiar with it. These diagrams could go a long way toward helping people understand how to enter and exit the building. (I personally have seen numerous people new to the building stop and ask students how to actually get out because they can’t find a way to get back outside.)
To begin to solve that problem, it should be made abundantly clear which floor users will end up on if they take a certain flight of stairs. Perhaps the users who originally designed these diagrams only had a few shades of gray to work with, but I see no reason why redesigned diagrams couldn’t make each individual step on any given set of stairs in a different shade to indicate which way was up and which way was down (see diagram above). What would make it even clearer would be text that spells out exactly which particular floors can be accessed by any given set of stairs.
In addition, these two diagrams appear on fairly small placards on any given floor of the CIT. I see no reason they couldn’t be made somewhat bigger and appear in more than just two locations (two locations close to one another, at that) on any given floor. (For a building whose layout is as confusing as that of the CIT, this change could make the layout of the building significantly more learnable.)
Lastly, while the designers of the diagrams seemed to have made some efforts to refer to some of the rooms and spaces by more than just their room numbers (e.g., “LANGUAGE LAB”, “RESOURCE CENTER”, etc.), this map would be much more helpful if it labeled any and all rooms and spaces more clearly (e.g., “TA ROOM”, “ELEVATOR,” “FIRST FLOOR LOBBY”, etc. as shown in the diagram above) and/or with the names by which these rooms and spaces are more commonly known nowadays (e.g., “FISHBOWL”, “MOONLAB”, etc.). Having such text can only help users better understand where they want to go.