For the last 6 weeks, I’ve been onsite with a client for a rather intensive, but pretty interesting project. But I won’t be writing about that. Instead, I’m going to tell you about the building I was working in for a month and a half.

The building is large. Its length extends for 2 small city blocks and it is 1 block in width. It is rectangular. The halls, offices, and cubicles are more or less laid out in a grid, suggesting that it should be easy to navigate and easy to form a mental model of the layout. But over and over, I find myself disoriented, confused about where I am, and getting lost in the building. I know how the building is laid out in my mind, but doggone it, I still end up walking to the wrong places.

First week. I get lost a few times. But that’s understandable. It’s a new building to me, I’ve got other things to focus on. No big deal. I feel I’m still getting oriented to the new environs.

Second week. I’m still feeling my way around a bit, so I pay attention to where I’m going and never feel surprised that I ended up going somewhere I didn’t intend on being.

Third week. I went up the escalator, walked to the corner of the building to my temporary cubicle, and it’s not there! It’s a weird feeling, like I know I’m where I’m supposed to be, but things are ever so slightly out of place. It’s a bit surreal. Turns out I had taken one escalator too many and was one floor too high. I’m at the correct GPS coordinates, but I’ve overshot about 15 feet in altitude. I go down a floor and everything is where it’s supposed to be.

Later that week, I follow my usual path (I think), walk to my corner of the building, and again, things are different. This time, I absent mindedly took a right turn off the escalator instead of a left and ended up at the wrong end of the building. So I made the 5 minute walk to the other end of the building and plopped down in my cubicle.

What does this have to do with usability? Well, I found the building to be extremely unusable. The user experience was pretty bad overall. And this despite having a straightforward architecture that provides a clear mental model. The problem was that there were few distinguishing features from one part of the building to another. There weren’t any named regions, and therefore no signs showing place or directions. There was nothing to distinguish one hallway from another. Nothing to distinguish one cluster of cubicles from the next.

And this relates to UI design because although a solid architecture is important, it’s not enough. Users need signposts of various sorts to help them know where they are and how to get to where they’re going. Breadcrumbs are useful, but more can be done. By implementing good visual design, applications and web sites can distinguish their various areas in distinct ways and this can be invaluable to the user.

Of course, this isn’t a new, groundbreaking concept. In fact, it’s pretty well established (though not always implemented), but I still find it fascinating to remember that such concepts stem from real, physical world traits and that there are still very intimate relationships between our virtual experiences and what happens to us in our physical-world lives.