Ada Krawczak, Elżbieta Sroka
Wayfinding allows people to move freely through a place space. The wayfinding design of a place should be intuitive and friendly to the end user. Proper wayfinding is influenced by properly constructed navigation – proper organization of elements, their labeling, and their accessibility ensuring no barriers for all interested parties. Visual aspects in wayfinding designs, such as the colors used, typefaces, and materials, are also important. The end user using a given place design may be satisfied or disappointed with the organization of a given space and wayfinding. Also, they may benefit from interactive elements that may or may not be additionally suggested while moving around. Ultimately, a user’s experience of using a given place may be considered friendly or perplexing to them, and indicative of their satisfaction on different levels. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of selected place designs in terms of the proposed wayfinding in terms of information architecture elements and their impact on user experience. Sites located in southern Poland (Royal Salt Mines in Wieliczka and Bochnia, Lead, Silver and Zinc Ore Mine in Tarnowskie Góry and underground water management system, Centennial Hall in Wrocław), which have been inscribed on the UNESCO list, were selected for the study. The research used the field research method and the comparative method. The results of the research will identify the applied elements in the selected UNESCO sites in terms of their organization, labelling, navigation and visual aspects and their impact on the end-user experience.