People get lost in big buildings for three reasons that add up: the layout hides where things are, the map in your head bends and simplifies what you walked through, and people navigate in different ways. Meeting someone inside works best at a place on the main route, named with a floor and a landmark, not a shop or gate number alone.
Three causes, not one
In 2010, Laura Carlson, Christoph Hölscher, Thomas Shipley and Ruth Conroy Dalton wrote a short review called Getting Lost in Buildings. They argued that people usually blame either the building or themselves, and that both are partly right. Three things combine.
The building's structure. Some layouts are easier to understand than others. Researchers use a method called space syntax to score how much of a building you can see from each point, and how well each place connects to the rest. Buildings with higher scores are easier to find your way around. Long straight corridors with views to the next space help. Identical junctions, dead ends and floors with different plans make it harder.
The map in your head. People do not store a building like a floor plan. They store routes and a few landmarks, and they simplify. A corridor with a slight bend tends to be remembered as straight. Turns get rounded to right angles. After a few of those, the mental map points you the wrong way, and you feel sure of it.
The person. Some people learn a building by the sequence of turns they took. Others build a picture of the layout from above. Spatial ability and working memory both play a part. Two friends who walked the same route can come away with very different ideas of where they are.
The authors' point is that getting lost happens where these meet: a building whose structure does not match the way its visitors think.
Floors are where it goes wrong
The review used the Seattle Central Library as an example. Its long escalators skip floors, so when you step off you cannot easily tell how the floor you are on links to the ones you passed. Airports, malls and hospitals do the same thing on a bigger scale, with mezzanines, split levels and lifts that only serve some floors.
Vertical movement is where mental maps break down most. People are much better at keeping track of left and right than of up and down. When a friend says they are "right by the food court", they often do not know which food court, or which floor it is on.
How to meet someone inside a big building
The research points to a few rules that work in any big building:
- Name the floor first. "Level 2, by the big clock" gives the most important information before the landmark.
- Pick a place on the main route. Meet where the building's main corridors cross, or by the main entrance. Both are places people pass through, so they are easy to find again.
- Use a landmark that cannot move. A clock, a statue or a lift lobby stays put. A coffee cart or a temporary display might not be there the next time.
- Describe what you see, not where you think you are. "I can see the escalator to the left and a pharmacy on the right" helps more than "near gate 30".
- Have one person stay still. If both people search, they cross paths and miss each other.
What a phone map can and cannot do indoors
Phones are weakest exactly where people get most lost. GPS signals do not pass well through roofs and thick walls, so a location inside a large building often comes from Wi-Fi and is less accurate, sometimes by tens of metres. Most maps also cannot show which floor someone is on. We explain more about this in why phone location jumps around.
That is why we treat OnTime as a way to get a group to the same building and the right side of it. A shared Radar shows that your friend is in the north terminal and not the south one, or that they have already left the car park. For the last few metres, the floor and a fixed landmark still do the work.