How to write a brief for a wayfinding project

Site boundaries and phasing

The first thing to fix is what counts as the site. External grounds and parking, the entrance, floors, separate buildings, the basement level: each of these may be in or out of scope. Ambiguity here is the most expensive kind, because a route does not end at a contract boundary — someone who has reached the car park keeps moving inwards.

If the system is rolled out in stages, the phasing is stated up front. The system is designed as a whole and fabricated by phase — that way the second phase does not force a rework of the first.

Visitor scenarios

This is the substantive part of the brief. For each category of visitor, describe where they enter from, what they are looking for, what they already know, and what happens when they fail to find it. A patient with an appointment, a walk-in patient, a companion, a courier, a member of staff, a contractor — each has their own route, and those routes coincide less often than expected.

Two or three lines per category is enough. The value is not in the volume but in the categories being listed at all: this is the step at which teams usually discover a flow nobody had designed for.

• Entry point: from the street, the car park, an underpass, an adjacent building
• Goal: a specific room, desk or waiting area
• What is known in advance: a room number, a department name, nothing
• Who accompanies them and whether that person has to find their way back
• What a lost visitor does — who they ask

Constraints and deliverables

Constraints are what cannot change: brand guidelines, landlord requirements, ceiling construction, walls that cannot be chased, an approved interior. The earlier they are named, the fewer decisions have to be undone.

Deliverables define what the client actually receives. The minimum working set is a sign location plan tied to floor drawings, a schedule with dimensions and materials, artwork in source files, and rules for maintaining the system. That last item is the one most often skipped, and its absence is why systems fall apart within two or three years: new signs get added without rules, and the logic is lost.

Acceptance criteria

A brief without acceptance criteria can only be signed off on taste. Usable criteria are measurable: the route from every entry point to every destination can be walked without asking staff; every decision point has a sign before it rather than after it; zone names match across signs, documents and staff speech; signs read from their design distance under the actual lighting.

Verification is done by walking the routes with someone visiting the site for the first time. That is the only way to tell a system that works from one that looks right on a drawing.