Signage by Design: A Design-Thinking Approach to Library User Experience

Abstract

Signage is a powerful visual tool for communication and a crucial component of the library user experience. Signage can welcome, guide, instruct, and delight users, helping them navigate the complex information world of any library. In practice, however, signage can be problematic, revealing tensions between various stakeholders, and contributing to visual noise through information overload; this often leads to signage blindness, library anxiety, and confusion. This article explores how libraries can use a design-thinking approach to improve the user experience in physical library spaces, particularly with respect to signage, based on our experience at the UTS Library, a university library in Australia that serves the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). We found that a design-thinking approach that uses the processes of empathy, problem definition, solution ideation, prototyping, and testing, can help libraries make significant and meaningful changes that can be adopted at relatively low cost.