Can you find your event room at SXSW?

As many events going on at the same time, the first step of finding the location of your target one is locating the hotel/bar/park/theatre where it is. If it is an indoor speech or meetup or anything else, you usually need to find the room once getting inside a hotel. We definitely get the instruction. But are they working well?

I have to keep telling everyone where to go as a volunteer.

In the entrance of the floor, participants constantly come to go to their event room. But for many of them, it is the first time coming to this hotel, how could they know where to go? The hotel I stayed in did not provide wayfinding on each floor. But SXSW design team did consider this need.

But why do we still need to tell everyone where to go?

Well, many of them cannot figure it out by looking at this map, then they still turn to ask a volunteer for the route.

What is wrong with this map?

People first need to know where they are, and they search for the most noticeable sign to locate themselves. However, it did take them a while to find the light yellow star which marks the current location. And then, to know where is the room they are looking for, they should image and match their location in the map and the real world. Not many of them made it. Even though there is the sign “N” to tell the direction, but who knows which side is where?

How to fix it?

It would not be too difficult to redesign a noticeable mark to help people locate them easily. And then, instead of letting them rotate the map in their brain to imagine where to go, if the direction of the map matches the real world, then everything would be intuitive.