Signs

Upon our last iteration of the prototype we decided that each one of us should do another state of the art-analysis and my task was to research Signs. Do we need them? How important are they? And what are they good for? Does it suit our context of use?

Signs are commonly used in a big variation of public spaces and many of them have an important purpose for usability. For our task and what I was looking in to was if we needed a specific sign for communicating that this vehicle uses a system to help passengers to be more spread out to leave room  - especially by the doors - to new boarding passengers.

As I researched this I noticed that signs do not differ so much from symbols (that Josefine was researching) in the sense of how they are communicating. From what I read of about semiotics and signs I came to the conclusion that we should focus our energy on doing a clear enough symbol that is easy to grasp, everybody understands directly and those not need to take help from an external source (signs) to understand it's purpose.

We have also been quite determined to make our product simplistic and inspired by Nudge Theory which in a way contradicts the use of signs. To put it short we want to affect human activity within these situations as subtle as possible.