Lost in the Labyrinth: Wayfinding Behavior in a Public Library—Predictable? Maybe Not

摘要

Wayfinding is how humans orient and navigate in space,and it requires wayfinders to seek and process spatialinformation, such as architectural cues, signs, and maps.This topic has been researched in many areas, but rarelypublic libraries, facilities that wayfinders enter with bothgeneral and spatial information needs (i.e., the need to usespatial information to locate an item that will provideinformation to satisfy the underlying information need).This poster presents one component of a multi-method casestudy with the purpose to explore user wayfinding behaviorin a medium-sized public library. The poster focuses onhow users navigate from the library entrance, which routesare most popular, and areas that experience the highesttraffic. Preliminary findings regarding node-to-node (stopto-stop) connections show that in many cases, multiplepeople connect the same two nodes via different segments;often, one of these is a predominant connecting segmentemployed by the majority of cases observed making thisconnection. These findings indicate that there may be twogroups of wayfinders: people who navigate the most directroute and those who navigate another path. This suggeststhat theories attempting to predict wayfinding behaviorneed to consider that not all wayfinding behavior may bepredictable to the same degree.