Study of customers wayfinding experience to improve functional efficiency in a large scale shopping complex in Bangladesh

Abstract

Customer’s wayfinding experience is an important factor for designing a functionally efficient shopping environment. During shopping activity, the customer prefers those environments that help them to understand the environment and provide clues for findings their own way. Research shows that efficient signage system, spatial layout and the legibility of the environment help customers to move through the shopping environment and help them finding their desired items within preferred time. When customers face difficulties in finding their way in a shopping environment, this make them feel lost, stressed, and insecure. Loss of time and energy due to frequent backtracking for reaching the desired destination also create a negative impression about the shopping complex, which may affect the customer return visit and preferences of shopping complex. Therefore, for designing a functionally efficient shopping environment, it is important to satisfy the customers need by developing a legible wayfinding system so that they can reach a specific destination within their desired time. However, few researches have tried to understand how the spatial and environmental variables influence the environmental legibility and functional efficiency of the shopping complex. Therefore, this research focuses on customer’s satisfaction in relation to signage system, spatial layout, and the legibility of the environment. In addition, how these variables create an impact on customer wayfinding experience as well as functional efficiency of the shopping complex. The research uses data collected from 60 customers of Bashundhara city shopping complex. The data include 75 hours of field observation over a period of four weeks, customers’ interview using a pre- coded questionnaire and syntactic properties of floor plan layout from depth map analysis. The research findings suggest that identification, directional, and orientation signage with appropriate size are very important for improving customers’ wayfinding experience. Symmetrical layout make customers confused and decrease their satisfaction level due to increase their travel time. In shopping environment atriums as landmark help customer to orient them within the shopping environment and make the customer satisfied by decreasing their travel time which help to improve legibility as well as functional efficiency of shopping environment. In addition, multiple atrium help customer to construct cognitive map and customer easily orients himself or herself within the shopping environment. It also improves customer’s travel time and wayfinding experience. It is expected that this research will help to propose design decision for architects, designer, and planners to improve customers’ wayfinding experience in large scale shopping complex.