This note is a review of, or perhaps just a reaction to, Library Signage and Wayfinding Design by Mark Aaron Polger.
A book is written with particular goals for a particular audience. One way to review a book unfairly is to measure it against some other goals, for some other book entirely, perhaps the book the reviewer themselves would have written. I'm probably guilty of that. In any case, my interest and focus is on public libraries. The signage I'm most interested in is signage for wayfinding, rather than, say, policy or marketing announcements.
This note can be found online at https://github.com/lagbolt/library/blob/main/Polgerbookreview.md
The license is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Graeme Williams
Las Vegas, NV
[email protected]
github.com/lagbolt
Library Signage and Wayfinding Design by Mark Aaron Polger focuses on research methods and a literature review. I'm not sure how you review a literature review, other than by doing your own literature review and comparing the two for completeness. Which, I should be clear, I am neither willing nor qualified to do.
Who is this book for? Polger doesn't say. Here are two possibilities:
- an academic librarian doing a research study in order to publish the results (and presumably add to the sum of human knowledge);
- an individual library working on improving their signage, which I think Polger refers to as a case study (page 21).
There's some overlap between the two, of course, but my guess is that the overlap disappears for all but the largest public libraries. Let's suppose you're the director of a medium-sized public library. If signage occurs to you at all, it will be in the form of three questions:
- Should I worry about signage?
- How good (bad?) is my signage?
- What's the simplest, cheapest thing I can do to improve my signage?
Polger mentions library anxiety, for example (page xv), "Signage can help reduce library anxiety and create a more positive user experience". And in a similar vein (page 7), "Symonds, Brown and LoIacono (2017) assert that wayfinding is an embodied social practice that evokes emotions such as anxiety, joy, nerves, and happiness when moving through a physical space". This suggests that the answer to the first question is "yes", you need to worry about signage at least a little, since it may be keeping some of your potential user population away. It also suggests that signage should be rated not on whether the patron manages to find where the biographies are shelved, but on how much anxiety they feel in the process.
This is the first example where I think Polger fails to make clear something that's relatively important in driving a strategy for signage. I think we should ask more of the book than just a list. A lot of the book reads as though signage is designed for the perfect patron, or the slightly less perfect. For example, you need to be careful about colors since some patrons are limited in their ability to distinguish colors. But what about the library patron who only has five minutes before they need to pick up their child from daycare, is worried about their mother's declining health, and just bumped into the revolving door at the library entrance? Anxiety is going to play a major role in how that patron responds to signage.
Evaluating the relationship between a sign and a library user is complicated, and Polger complicates it nicely. Once you've mentioned eye-tracking (page 20), you're a couple of steps past our hypothetical medium-sized library director. Let's dump the "How good?" question into the too-hard basket and proceed to, "What's the simplest, cheapest thing I can do?"
Mollerup (Wayshowing > Wayfinding, 2005 and 2013) points out the distinction between the layout and signage of the (library) building, for which he coined the term "wayshowing", and the "wayfinding" that a patron does to navigate the layout. But for libraries, this misses a step. The library patron is not trying to locate a particular place within the building, they are trying to:
- locate a particular part of the collection, or
- solve a particular problem (say, renewing their card)
I think part of the problem here is the view that the library provides a basket of services located at service points throughout the building. Therefore signage is to direct patrons to service points; the collection is invisible.
It's not true that wayshowing is fixed by the architecture of the building, since even if we assume that shelving can't be moved, how the collection is assigned to shelving is certainly negotiable. For example, are new books in a particular category (say, Romance) shelved within the category, or collected together into a separate New Books shelf. So wayfinding can be easier or harder depending on prior decisions about the organization of the library.
I don't think Polger is clear enough on the distinction between navigating to a location and navigating to a solution. At the local branch of my public library, you pick up interlibrary loans from the reference desk. Treating "find the reference desk" as a wayfinding problem misses the point – you first need to know that's where you go. It's true that signage can only do so much, but it's legitimate to ask whether signage is helping or hurting.
Which raises another interesting question. Perhaps we're veering into "the book I would have written" rather than "the book Polger actually wrote", but names matter. Why is it called the reference desk? That's also where you go at my local library if you can't find a book on the shelf. A reference librarian will go and check all the carts in the staff area, which seems a lot of bother, so I only do that for books my wife wants. And is it true for every public library in the US that the Help/Welcome/Customer Service desk does exactly two things: check out and library cards?
Signage is solving a problem set by various characteristics of library services, mostly names and locations, and while it isn't necessarily easy to move a desk, its name can help or hurt wayfinding.
Polger mentions maintenance for two paragraphs (page 36) but I think it's far more important than that. One of the ways signage fails is when a name changes (say, a service desk) and the signage isn't changed. At my local library, there's a sign for homework help directing teens to Youth Services, which I believe is now called the Young Peoples Library. And a sign in the Holds area mentions that holds can be checked out at the Circulation Desk, which is now called Customer Service.
What's the plan for maintenance? Polger gives a five-point plan for a signage strategy (page 9), but it's for a single signage project. Are you going to do signage maintenance every six months? Every three months? Step 1 is "research your audience", which is fine, but is that something you need to do every three months?
So what's a public librarian to do?
I think they easiest way for a librarian to evaluate and improve wayfinding is by pretending to be a patron. Polger mentions (page 24) that you can ask patrons to record (or at least remember) their experience performing some particular task, such as returning a book or finding a particular part of the collection. The issue for a librarian is that they know too much for this to be a realistic exercise to do themselves, but I believe with a little discipline you can get useful results by imagining what it's like to know less than you do. If your library has more than one branch, you could always ask a librarian at one branch to navigate another.
Let's suppose your task is to find a copy of "The Book of Swords", an anthology of short stories edited by Gardner Dozois. The information in the online catalog indicates collection = "Adult" and call number = "SS", which you understand (somehow!) to mean the Short Story shelves in the Adult Fiction area. Four branches in Las Vegas have copies. You go to one of the branches and enter the front door. Now what?
My guess is that for anything bigger than the smallest public library, the only thing that will work is to walk through the entire library until you arive at the short story section by chance. If you're lucky, you'll be able to identify the fiction section and cut your time in half. I doubt that there will be any signage that will help you, with the possible exception of a sign on the Short Story shelves themselves, once you arrive.
By the way, I don't think that "Ask a librarian" is a complete answer. It comes down to library anxiety. Some people will be comfortable asking a librarian for directions, and some won't. As a rough rule of thumb, you might as well assume signage is for people who aren't comfortable asking.
There's a lot of useful information in Polger's book, and quite a bit of useful insight. There are many references for following up in particular areas. What's left to the reader is sorting all this information into more or less relevant (to their library) and more or less important in driving strategy.
Like other books on signage projects, this book has a collection of before and after pictures. I find these endlessly fascinating, because one question leaps immediately to mind: is the "after" picture really better than the "before" picture. Let's look at one example (page 60, unnumbered photos from Brookdale Community College, New Jersey).
The before photo shows what looks like a paper sign printed by computer. It says, "WELCOME! THE LIBRARY IS OPEN TODAY UNTIL 4:30 PM". It looks terrible, but the one piece of information on the sign ("open until 4:30") is clear. You could probably walk past this sign and absorb this subconsciously.
The after photo show a column with a large vertical sign. The largest text is "Welcome!". There is a lot of text, as well as five icons. The two most important pieces of information on the sign are "open until 5:00PM" and "straight ahead" but they get lost in the design and the beautiful sans serif display font. So for me, the sign "looks nice" but doesn't seem all that functional. It's also worth pointing out that this sign voilates every rule you've heard about not putting too many words on one sign.
It's easy to think of a better layout. You could move "Welcome!" to the top of the sign and move "straight ahead" to where "Welcome!" is now. You also need to graphically distinguish between the two kinds of information (closing time and directions).
This last point is kind of important. Jordan Ruud, from the University of Arkansas, says (page 47), "To start with, we wanted to achieve a sense of visual unity (but without an absolute uniformity that might make signs go unread because they don't stand out)." This is another critical factor which needs more emphasis: similar signs should be similar, different signs should be different.
Polger describes decision points (page xviii) as "a point where a user must make a decision". Left unsaid is that at the point where the user makes a decision, they need the information required to make the decision. This means that in order for a patron to locate the short story shelves, they might need more than a sign on the shelves themselves.
This comes down to sight lines, something Polger doesn't seem to mention (it's not in the index). If you can see the short story shelves, you don't need a sign directing you towards them. This is where the layout of the library can help. A lot of public libraries are arranged with the front door leading to a central aisle. It's reasonable for patron to go down the aisle checking what's on either side. What you might need directional signs for are shelves that are away from the central aisle.
When you're pretending to be a patron navigating the library, it makes sense to stop often – at potential decision points – and ask:
- Where can I go from here?
- What can I see from here?
- Do I need x-ray vision?
- Are there enough signs? Too many?
Let's suppose you've completed – and passed – an exhaustive ADA audit. There's one more thing I want you to do. You need to make sure that people can find the resources that they need. If, for example, you have wheelchair-compatible computers, make sure that you have signage directing wheelchair users to them.