CAPABILITIES

As experts in wayfinding strategy, we consider the components that inform a successful strategy: wayfinding system design, stakeholder facilitation, and user-centered research. Our capabilities cover the services needed to create successful systems, regardless of size or scope. As each project is unique, we work with clients to determine which services are best suited for their project needs.

Wayfinding Strategy

We work with a variety of clients including architects, engineers, planners, owners, and developers with one core purpose: to collaborate early on in the process and identify a strategic wayfinding approach that meets the project needs. Our specialties include creating system-wide master plans and guidelines, performing user research and analysis, and adapting and expanding existing systems to inform thoughtful, comprehensive systems for existing environments. In the end, these systems support the design, communications, and experience of the brand.

Wayfinding Design

We consider all the ways visitors interact with the built environment. A comprehensive wayfinding system considers all tools visitors would need or have access to along their journey. This may include visual landmarks, static signage, large-scale environmental graphics, printed materials, websites, mobile apps, digital signage, or customer service teams. The goal is to create a seamless user experience and maximize engagement. This approach is tailored per client to be best suited for the visitor needs, architectural conditions, and physical landscape of the space, ensuring that the proper wayfinding tool is presented to the visitor at the key time and place in a format that is most accessible to them.

Stakeholder Facilitation

Great projects are built on great communication and great wayfinding systems consider the perspectives of all stakeholders. As trained facilitators, we guide discussions at every level and every phase, strengthening relationships and ensuring a successful outcome. We work closely with our clients’ decision makers, advisory boards, user-facing teams, facilities groups, and consult specialists in adjacent disciplines such as architecture, lighting, and IT to build an integrated, seamless system. We have experience building consensus and gaining approval from community boards and government committees.

User-Centered Research

Through qualitative and quantitative research, we learn what visitors need—and want—and align those goals with our client’s mission and vision. We are mediators for, and advocates of, visitors to ensure the best possible user journey. Wayfinding is a customer service opportunity that provides people of all abilities a seamless journey. By using a variety of tools, the results provide visitors a sense of ease, comfort, and safety. It affords guests the freedom to explore and discover the unexpected along the way, or efficiently navigate complex spaces to reach their destination without frustration.

APPROACH

Via Collective delivers creative excellence in wayfinding strategy by working with stakeholders to realize an engaged and successful journey for each individual.

Our methods are based on proven and effective wayfinding principles of understanding user experience, clear and consistent graphic design applications, and appropriate architectural scale and functionality—all through the lens of Universal Design to drive equity of access to place.

By auditing existing systems, conducting user research, and prototyping designs before final implementation, we create wayfinding systems that are useful, integrated, and supportive to the environment and the people who use it.

In collaborating with our clients, we frame wayfinding as a customer service experience, fundamental to increasing visitor engagement, fostering a sense of safety to explore, and encouraging return visits to continue exploration.

Our wayfinding solutions should instill a sense of safety and security, so people have the confidence to explore and further their engagement with the built environment.

PROCESS

Our process is based on best practices and decades of wayfinding expertise, but the results and recommendations are as diverse as the projects, the stakeholders, and the individual visitors.

No two projects are the same: each strategy is as unique as the visitors’ needs, the conditions of the environment, and the existing brand. We believe a project is successful when our hand is invisible in the final system—when people navigate their journey with a sense of ease and safety without realizing we guided them the whole way.

Every project moves through four critical phases: Discovery, Strategy, Design, and Support. This process provides the foundation to develop solutions rooted in the challenges and opportunities faced by visitors, and ultimately implement an effective wayfinding design.

Via Collective - Branding & Communication

Discovery

We begin by gathering all the data around the project. We confirm our understanding of the goals and approach, audit the current information, graphic and wayfinding systems, listen to stakeholders, and conduct user-centered research. During this phase, we work to identify current successes and challenges, as well as any regulations or requirements that will inform the design parameters of the new system. All of this allows us to gain a deep understanding of the current situation and desired outcomes.

Strategy

In order for the strategy to meet the project goals and the needs of the visitor, we take into account architecture, branding, and usability. We then integrate these components into the findings of the discovery stage. Layering in industry best practices, technological innovation, and our own insights, we create a unique strategy for each client and their project. Our strategy approach is all-encompassing of each wayfinding element experienced during a user journey, including static and digital signage, customer service, print & media materials, and building and landmark cues.

Design

Our designs seamlessly integrate with the architectural and branded environment. We follow the architectural design process: ideating concepts in schematic design and refining the system during design development, including implementing mockups and prototypes to confirm the graphic approach, before finally preparing construction documents and moving toward implementation. Our extensive experience allows us to create the highest-quality program in collaboration with the construction and fabrication teams.

Support

We don’t stop working after the project has been installed. We work with our clients to maintain the wayfinding system and keep it current, whether that’s providing data on the success of the new system through user surveys, recommending in-house processes for maintenance and updates, or any other supporting actions we can take to ensure the ongoing success of the system. When significant renovations or site changes are made, we are able to reengage to expand and integrate the new elements within the existing system.