Zuckerberg San Francisco General Wayfinding Study
Zuckerberg SF General Wayfinding Study
Rethinking Hospital Navigation
CONTEXT & SCALE
A Campus Grown Faster Than Its Signage
Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center is a high-volume public safety-net hospital, delivering inpatient, outpatient, emergency, skilled nursing, diagnostic, mental health, and rehabilitation care to one of the city's most diverse patient populations. Originally built in the late 1800s at 1001 Potrero Avenue, the campus has expanded into 13 buildings, with more renovations and additions still ahead. Guiding people through it fell to a three-firm team: BA leading design research, environmental graphic design firm Shannon Leigh translating that research into signage and wayfinding strategy, and digital health partner Comprendo extending the experience beyond the physical campus. The team set out to prove that wayfinding could be more than a hospital amenity. The client's own framing was that it needed to be radically inclusive.
THE CHALLENGE
Designing for Every Kind of Traveler
The challenge was blunt: navigating the campus had become a genuine barrier to care. Any fix needed to work for a population spanning every level of mobility, sensory ability, cognitive capacity, cultural background, language, literacy, and acuity. The solution also needed to hold up through ongoing construction, department relocations, and future growth. It also had to feel inspirational rather than merely functional, reflecting the client's brand while covering digital wayfinding, room and directional signage, campus and building identification, and multilingual, regulatory-compliant design.
RESEARCH APPROACH
Mapping How People Actually Navigate
The team grounded its process in a formal, research-backed model of how people find their way: first orienting themselves ("Where am I?"), then selecting a route ("Where am I going?"), then executing it turn by turn ("How do I get there?"), and finally recognizing they've arrived ("How do I know I am there?"). Each stage pointed to a different design lever: landmark cues like Twin Peaks and downtown San Francisco to support orientation at campus arrival points, simplified path sequences at decision points to ease route control, and strong, multisensory place-making to support destination recognition.
The team paired that framework with patient walkalongs, personas, and journey maps to surface real user struggles, then stress-tested emerging concepts with focus groups and immersive VR simulations, including sessions with wheelchair users to evaluate accessibility firsthand. Interviews across languages confirmed a root cause behind the confusion: buildings were numbered non-sequentially with no overarching zone logic, leaving even longtime staff and visitors disoriented.
CAMPUS STRATEGY & DESIGN
Zones, Language, and a Digital Front Door
Because replacing the historic building-numbering scheme proved cost-prohibitive, the team leaned harder into zone-based color coding and symbolic to improve building saliency, alongside a proposed "Main Street" path and central campus hub tested through pedestrian simulation. Directional signage was designed multilingually from the outset, with English, Spanish, and Chinese appearing side by side at key decision points such as the outpatient clinic entrance. Comprendo extended this same person-centered thinking into a mobile app functioning as a digital front door, covering not just physical wayfinding but administrative, medical, social, and multi-modal navigation, from pre-visit checklists to real-time directions and parking.
IMPLEMENTATION
Wayfinding as Clinical Infrastructure
The client's decision to centralize outpatient clinical services was projected to cut average patient walking distances in half. To manage the volume of recommendations, the team built out a phased design and implementation strategy: concept design, schematic design, design development, and construction documentation. This was combined with an art and brand integration strategy and a multi-year procurement roadmap. But the process reshaped more than the plan; it reshaped how administrators think about wayfinding itself. Staff had been spending upward of 30 minutes per shift escorting patients who couldn't find their way, and acute patients were losing valuable time wandering instead of reaching care. The clearest lesson of the study wasn't a design detail at all: Wayfinding is a key aspect of delivering care.
