I recently noticed something interesting about the mall directory graphics in my local mall, the Natick Collection (because apparently calling it a "mall" would be just so...2007).

Here's the first directory I encountered, all the way at one end of the mall, outside Macy's.

As you can see from the closeup, Macy's is all the way at the bottom.

Here's the next directory I encountered:

I took this from the same angle, standing in front of the directory. Notice anything strange?

The map has a totally different orientation: Lord & Taylor at the bottom, Macy's on the left.

Intrigued, I walked through the whole mall and found that virtually every directory I passed used a different orientation.

All of the pictures below were taken from standing in front of the directory and are presented in the order I took them. As you can see from the "You are here" stars, I basically walked from one end of the mall to the other (from Macy's to Sears) and then up (down? sideways?) into the wing with Neiman Marcus at the end.

Note that there's only one place where two consecutive directories use the same orientation.

The effect of directory orientation on mall wayfinding

I discovered this while on a trip to the mall during which I had to stop at a number of stores I rarely go to (I'm not a big fan of malls, and I have a 10-month-old, so I tend to save up my mall shopping to do all in one epic trip).

I had to look at directories multiple times during the trip to find my next store, and I found that every time I had to stop and re-orient myself to the map in its new configuration.

I suspect that this is because, much the way people recognize common printed words by their shape rather than parsing each letter individually, I was doing my wayfinding using the rough (and quite distinctive) shape of the mall itself.

Every time I came to a new directory, it made the shape of the mall unfamiliar all over again. I had to first "learn" the new map before even looking for the "You are here" star and planning my next move.

It is helpful that the color-coding, at least, is consistent from map to map, but I found myself relying on the color blocks much less than the shape.

Directory orientation: nature or nurture?

I have a hard time believing the orientations are random, especially since the directories were created after the mall was renovated several years ago, which added the entire Neiman Marcus wing and the adjacent luxury condos and transformed it into an extremely upscale shopping destination. I can't believe they did such a massive and expensive set of renovations without putting any thought into the directory experience.

However, even after consideration I still can't figure out the rhyme or reason behind the various orientations. For instance, they don't seem to be arranged so that "up" is always the direction you're facing as you look at the directory, or so that "up" is always the direction you're facing as you come out of the closest department store. They're not reliably clockwise or counter-clockwise.

I suspect that the mall didn't consider my use case when designing these maps. It's possible that it's optimized for someone entering the mall from one of the entrances near a directory and looking at only a single directory (I unfortunately didn't examine this closely while I was there).

It's even possible that the mall designed this disorienting experience deliberately to force me to look at the map closely (to notice other enticing stores, perhaps? Although the store listing is so far from the map itself that I find it unlikely that this would actually work).

If anyone manages to figure out the rhyme or reason, please post it to the comments. I'd love to know! For now, I'm back to planning my route in advance using the Web site (which, by the way, uses a totally different directory format and color scheme. Sigh).

When will they start making a GPS device for malls?