Sensory sensitivity wayfinding: Adelaide Railway Station pilot

The main objective of the completed iMOVE project Sensory sensitivity wayfinding for complex public transport hubs was to produce functional prototypes of digital wayfinding solutions that respond to user requirements, demonstrating the feasibility and potential of sensory-friendly design.

Work on the project was carried out by the makers of BindiMaps, an inclusive wayfinding app designed to help people of all abilities navigate complex and unfamiliar indoor locations, such as office buildings, hospitals, shopping centres and more.

Background and objectives

Sensory sensitivity is atypical reactivity to everyday sensory input (sound, light, smell, touch, movement, crowding) at a level that disrupts daily participation. The sensitivity affects people with autism, ADHD, sensory processing disorder, anxiety, PTSD and dementia. Roughly one in five children in the general population also show at least one atypical sensory pattern.

This project began as research into what makes built environments, in particular for this work public transport hubs, hard for people with sensory sensitivities. The work adopted a three-milestone approach.

Milestones

Milestone 1

Problem-scoping: via semi-structured interviews with people with sensory sensitivities and the practitioners who support them. Noise and auditory load emerged as the dominant sensory channel, alongside lighting, crowding and unfamiliarity. Predictability was identified as the underlying access need.

Milestone 2

Production of a Static Sensory Mapping Report of Adelaide Railway Station: annotated site maps, a mapping methodology, sensory-trigger categories with severity levels, and a validation focus group on the static product.

Milestone 3

Took the findings from the first two milestones and built an interactive product.

Pilot site

Once built, the product was run in a pilot program at Adelaide Railway Station, the underground rail hub at Festival Drive and North Terrace on the northern edge of the Adelaide CBD.

The pilot was run with Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect) as research partner and Public Transport South Australia (PTSA) as operator partner. Aspect conducted the on-site sensory audit, recruited participants and ran the focus groups.

The live pilot guide can be seen at Sensory Guide Web App: Adelaide Railway Station.

Across four rounds of testing, the project pivoted from sensory map to planning guide. Participants treated the resource as something to read before a trip rather than consult during one. The original sensory map overwhelmed them. The redesigned guide leads with progressive disclosure, real photographs and multi-select sensory filters, with the map as a secondary reference. The redesign was received positively in the second focus group, with overwhelm language absent.

Conclusion

The work produced a six-component framework with 22 design guidelines, each traced to focus-group evidence and to a feature built or flagged for future build.

Accessibility and security reviews of the build, combining automated scanning with manual inspection, cleared the guide for continued deployment subject to two short security fixes, since completed.

The top recommendation is to run a pre-and-post planning-anxiety and confidence survey alongside a wider deployment. Following that, test the same approach at other venues and with other sensory-sensitive groups.

Furtehr work

Three research questions sit outside the Milestone 3 evidence base and are the priorities for the next stage of work.

• A pre-and-post planning-anxiety and confidence instrument: A short, repeatable measure administered before and after a piloted deployment would quantify what both focus groups reported qualitatively.
• Transfer to other venue types: The pilot tested one underground rail station. The framework should be tested at airports, shopping centres, stadiums, universities, civic spaces, museums, and hospitals.
• Transfer to other constituencies: Deafblind, dementia-affected, PTSD, generalised anxiety, hearing impairment, non-autism sensory processing differences and older adults remain untested.

Additionally, no Australian standard exists for the visual language sensory-mapping resources use. It is recommended that Standards Australia, Aspect, Autism SA’s Autism Friendly Charter and Dementia Australia collaborate on drafting an Australian conformity standard for sensory mapping.

Expected project impacts

The clearest lesson from this project was that people with sensory sensitivities don’t want a map of everything that might go wrong. They want to know what a place will be like before they leave home. That changed what we built, and it has changed how we think about wayfinding for everyone.

The findings haven’t stayed in the report. We’ve already built them into the core BindiMaps app. 3D photo views of indoor spaces let people see a place before they arrive, and sensory warnings mean a loud or crowded area doesn’t come as a surprise.

Adelaide Railway Station is still actively using the Sensory Guide, which tells us the approach works outside a research setting. The next step is to make it repeatable. We want to keep working with Aspect so that sensory audits become a routine part of mapping a venue, and a station, hospital or shopping centre can offer a sensory guide as standard.

Keith Urquhart, Head of Product, BindiMaps

Download final report

Download your copy of the final report, Sensory Sensitivity Wayfinding, by clicking the button below.