Use wayfinding signs in your healthcare facility to make navigation easy for your patients.
Patients are often stressed out even before they arrive at healthcare facilities. The challenge of locating hospitals and finding the right treatment areas within them further builds up the anxiety. Having efficient wayfinding signs in the correct spots goes a long way to improve the healthcare experience for people, who are then more likely to make repeat visits for treatment.
Here are some tips to making the most out of wayfinding signs in your healthcare facility:
Develop a Standard System
Before anything else, it’s important to understand that visitors heavily rely on wayfinding signs to navigate around and reach the correct destination in the hospital. Unlike your staff, many people would be visiting the facility for the first time, so they’re not familiar with the areas like you and your staff are.
That’s why standardization is the key to effective wayfinding signs. This means you’ll need to develop a consistent jargon of building and area names within the healthcare facility. To help visitors better understand the layout of the building, use a consistent room numbering system. This should allow people to anticipate how far they are from their destination.
Learn from Visitors
No matter how robust your signage strategy is, there’ll always be room for improvement. Engage your visitors and listen to what they have to say, and use these insights to shape your strategy. To monitor the performance of your wayfinding signs, you’ll need to develop a system of obtaining user feedback.
While you may choose to conduct surveys for recent visitors, many other aspects indicate whether or not your wayfinding signs are doing their job. For example, some people would themselves mention how lost they were while finding the correct area for an appointment.
Track the number of times you or your staff are stopped to seek directions during the day or simply observe visitor reactions as they find their way in the hospital space.
Signage Design
Make sure that the signs are consistent in size, shape, wording, and symbols. You don’t want people guessing the possibilities. Use a combination of universal symbols and languages other than English. This should ensure that your wayfinding signs cater to diverse audiences. To further ease navigation throughout the facility, consider using distinctive, color-coded signage on each floor.
Take ADA Regulations into Account
You must also ensure ADA compliance when you are planning your healthcare wayfinding signs. Make sure you are aware of the stringent ADA design requirements for signage. ADA guidelines include ensuring the right contrast between characters and backgrounds, proper fonts that must be free from highly decorative or stylized characters, specific positioning in terms of height, etc.
To sum it up, wayfinding signs play a crucial role in healthcare centers. Investing in top-quality signs should enhance the healthcare experience, boosting your patient traffic in a short time.
For effective, ADA-compliant wayfinding signs, get in touch with QC Signs & Graphics.
