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November 28, 2005
JFK AirTrain's Bad Wayfinding
JFK AirTrain's Bad Wayfinding
Originally uploaded by yatta.
Perhaps it's my own incompetence, but I had a hard time figuring out which train I had to take to get to Long Term Parking Lot B the other day. Wayfinding on the AirTrain platform is kept to a minimum. This makes for a clean, ultra-mod look but it's damn hard to figure out where you need to go when you're getting off of a six hour flight. Looking at the confused faces on the travelers around me, I wasn't the only one with a problem.
I figure that it took me 30 seconds to locate the map in the room, two minutes to interpret the three train lines (which side is the "loop" and where do the "outbound" trains stop?), five minutes to understand what the two-line red-on-black LED above the tracks meant (small, dim and in a different font than the map), and once I'm on the train, it took me another 30 seconds of listening to the automated announcement (and checking the map again) to make sure that I'm on the right one. Once on board, I spent another five minutes helping my fellow travelers get to their destinations.
Dan: this is a bad one. but the one Michael posted ( www.flickr.com/photos/deprimer/65234082/ ) is even worse, methinks. on top of the fact, that they can't at least decide on a single bad way to do airtrain infographics.
And David solves it all by mashing my AirTrain photo with my Portable Video diagram. ;)
Posted by yatta at November 28, 2005 2:55 PM