Getting a Grip on How People Actually Walk Around
Alright, let’s talk about watching people walk. Sounds simple, right? But when you’re trying to plan a big venue, like a conference center or a festival ground, knowing where folks will naturally go, where they’ll bunch up, and where they’ll just completely avoid… that’s gold. I’ve spent a fair bit of time trying to figure this stuff out, not just looking at blueprints, but actually getting boots on the ground.
My first real dive into this was for a city festival. They had this big open park area, and the planners had drawn up these neat, tidy paths on a map. Looked great on paper. They asked me to sort of, well, “validate” the flow. So, what did I do? First thing, I just went there. Not during the festival setup, but on a regular busy weekend. I just sat on a bench for hours, watching.
Seriously, just watching. Where did people cut across the grass instead of using the paved path? Where did groups stop to chat, blocking everyone else? Where did the queues for the ice cream van snake around?
- I noticed folks always took the shortest distance between the entrance and the main fountain, even if it meant trampling the flowerbeds.
- People avoided the designated ‘quiet zone’ like it was haunted – turns out it had lousy shade.
- The spot near the only big tree became an unofficial meeting point, causing a huge bottleneck.
This wasn’t rocket science, just simple observation. But it told me more than any computer model could have at that stage. The planners had designed for how they wanted people to move, not how they actually did move.
So, armed with my scribbled notes and phone pictures, I went back. We talked about it. Instead of fighting the desire lines (those paths people naturally make), we decided to reinforce some of them, maybe put down temporary walkways for the festival. We suggested moving the food stalls away from that big tree to spread people out.
Trying Different Stuff
Later projects got a bit more involved. For a new shopping mall layout, sitting on a bench wasn’t enough. We needed data during peak hours. We tried using simple hand-clicker counters at key spots – entrances, escalators, main junctions. Four or five of us, spread out, just clicking away for a couple of hours on a Saturday.
It felt a bit silly, honestly. Just standing there, click-click-clicking. But the numbers we got were super useful. We could see which entrances were overwhelmingly popular and which ones were barely used. We saw that the flow to the food court was massive, but the flow out used totally different routes.
We even tried some basic tracking once. Not creepy face-recognition stuff, nothing like that. More like asking volunteers (we gave them coffee vouchers!) if we could just passively observe their general path using wifi signals or simple coloured badges observers could spot. It gave us a rough idea of common routes through a complex space, like which shops people typically visited in sequence.
What I learned through all this wasn’t some magic formula. It was more about remembering that people are people. They look for shortcuts, they get drawn to interesting things, they stop to talk, they hate inconvenient paths, and they really gravitate towards food and bathrooms. You can draw the prettiest lines on a map, but reality is always messier. You gotta get out there, watch, count, sometimes even just ask people, to get a real feel for how a space will actually be used. It takes time, and sometimes it’s tedious, but it beats having an empty venue section or a dangerous crush zone later on.