抄録
Introduction
Guide signs are an important source of information that assists users in navigating railway stations, but they are becoming more complex each year. Through the past decades in Japan, major Japanese railway companies have established signage systems that regulate the amount of information, design of signs, and locations of signs to make the signs understandable for users. However, when surveying stations in Japan, the authors found not only official signs (Fig. 1), designed in conformance with the signage system regulations, but also additional signs (Fig. 2), which were made by local station staff. The additional signs were generally made deliberately to supplement information missing from the official signs based on user needs; however, previous studies have not clarified how users evaluate these additional signs.
The goal of this study was to clarify user evaluation of the additional signs in railway stations by using an online survey focusing on the amount of information and the design elements in these sings. Then, positive and negative factors of the additional signs were extracted to improve the sign guidelines for railway stations.
Method
An online questionnaire survey about additional signs was conducted among 3,446 station users who expressed an interest in station signs. The respondents evaluated several station signs using the semantic differential method with nine evaluation items selected by the authors (Table 1) in a five-step scale (Fig. 3). The evaluated signs were made by the authors in such a way that they imitated the additional signs and described the same information showing the way to a track, but with different styles. The questionnaire was sectioned into the following two parts with regard to the varied elements in the evaluated signs:
1) Amount of information (Table 2, Fig. 4)
Four signs were each presented in two different amount of information levels, “length of sign description” and “distance information.”
2) Design elements (Table 4, Fig. 7)
Nine signs selected using the Latin square were presented by differing the font, background color, and graphical illustration.
Results
1) Positive and negative factors on signs
All of the user evaluation items expecting the quality of “attractive” had a similar trend. Tables 5 and 6 summarize the negative and positive factors from the evaluation. Although these positive factors are actually used on official signs, additional signs adopting these positive factors (such as Fig. 11) would also have high evaluations.
2) Particular evaluation structure on evaluation item of “attractive”
The effect of background color on user evaluation (Fig. 9) suggests that the evaluation item “attractive” would have a different evaluation structure than the other items. This result supports the finding of a previous study9)* that there are the two different factors, “attractive” and “easily understood destination direction,” that are essential for additional signs for smooth movement about the station.
3) Tolerance of old generations of additional signs
Although handwriting is an especially negative factor of signs (Fig. 8), the older generations (50s and 60s) evaluated this factor slightly more highly than the other generations. Regarding the other factors, they also had tolerance for the signs that had typical characteristics of additional signs.
Conclusions
The study revealed positive/negative signs and evaluation tendencies by generation on elements of additional signs. Further study needs to address the effects of sign location to collect additional information for the planning of additional signs.
