Auckland Hospital: Wayfinding isn’t accidental. It needs ownership.
- Humanics Collective
- Jun 15
- 2 min read
Updated: Nov 30
At a busy campus, whether a hospital, airport, or university, people seek a service. Yet many campuses struggle to provide a coherent experience from entry to destination. Despite a shared sense of frustration, the root problem often goes unaddressed. Local fixes, like laminated signs, pop up as symptoms of a deeper service issue, where individual departments lack the remit or capability to take ownership of the full journey.
Campuses are typically divided into spheres of accountability: a Facilities department for buildings, a Customer Service department for appointment letters and text reminders, and a Communications team for the website. But the core services they support, a flight, a hip replacement, a court appearance, are disconnected, as are the budgets and responsibilities.
Where the wayfinding experience isn’t actively managed across these functions, quality deteriorates. Laminated signs multiply. Complaints rise. And overall performance suffers each time someone arrives late, stressed, or interrupts a staff member to ask for directions. The longer the system fails, the harder, and more expensive, it becomes to restore.
What went wrong with Auckland City Hospital wayfinding
A lack of ownership over the patient journey led to inconsistencies across touchpoints. Letters said one thing. Text messages another. The website pointed somewhere else again. On site, messages clashed at key intersections.
The team ordering signage wasn’t responsible for patients arriving at the right place. The Communications team couldn’t overhaul hundreds of decentralised letter templates. Individual services often didn’t know where their patients should park, let alone how they found their way, because they didn’t own the journey to their service.
To support a systemic fix, we started with a Gap Analysis (part of our Evaluation, Research, and Testing services). In collaboration with the hospital’s in-house Service Design team, we spent over a week on site to understand the hospital’s layout, its processes, and user needs in detail. This included extensive staff workshops across departments to capture first-hand knowledge, identify breakdowns, and map inconsistencies across communications, signage, and experience.
Poor wayfinding causes stress and delays and undermines trust in the health system. For underserved communities, the impact can be even more serious, with direct consequences for clinical outcomes.
Fixing the system means owning the journey
To implement a new wayfinding system for the Auckland Hospital, including typography, sign designs, and governance rules, a coalition of Consumer Experience, Facilities, Security, and Communications took collective ownership. The project was presented at Board level to secure senior sponsorship and re-establish wayfinding as a key organisational discipline.
In healthcare, better experience is not a luxury, it’s essential to better care. Wayfinding must be treated as an ongoing discipline, not a one-off design project. That means assigning ownership, setting standards, and creating a structure to maintain quality over time. Because the person printing the signs can’t also be the one responsible for getting people safely to their destination.
If no one owns the journey, it fails
If we want people to arrive calmly and confidently, someone has to make sure that happens.
