Who owns the journey?

Gideon Wilkinson, co-founder and managing director at Endpoint, explains why wayfinding systems need to become operational platforms.

The places we navigate are becoming larger, more connected and changeable. Airports adjust passenger routes. Hospitals relocate services. Campuses add buildings. Stadiums switch between matchday, concert and everyday use. Cultural and visitor destinations continually change their programmes and facilities.

Yet the systems helping people navigate these places are often managed as fixed design projects. A strategy is agreed, signs and screens are installed and the project is completed. The destination evolves, but the system does not always evolve with it.

Information becomes outdated. Temporary notices become permanent. Departments introduce their own signs. The terminology used online differs from the language encountered on arrival. Visitors struggle to find entrances, parking, platforms, seats, services or exits.

These may seem like small problems, but they accumulate into a poor customer experience.

The question is not simply who designed the system. It is who owns the journey once the project is complete?

The ownership gap

The underlying issue is rarely a lack of concern. It is a lack of clear ownership. Marketing may control the brand and pre-arrival communications. Facilities management maintains physical signs. Operations responds to daily changes. Digital teams manage websites and applications. Security, accessibility, commercial and tenant teams introduce further information.

Each team may be making reasonable decisions, but nobody necessarily owns the complete journey.

The wider customer experience

From the user's perspective, these are not separate experiences. A visitor might encounter a destination online, receive directions on their phone, follow physical signage to a car park and then use a digital map or member of staff to complete their journey. It is one journey.

That makes wayfinding part of the customer experience, and therefore part of the brand experience.

Customers do not separate navigation from the rest of their experience. They simply know whether a place feels easy or difficult to use. Uncertainty creates stress and affects how they perceive the competence and welcome of an organisation. A visitor who arrives late because an entrance was difficult to find does not regard that as a signage problem. It becomes part of their opinion of the organisation.

In healthcare, the consequences can be more tangible. An evaluation at University Hospitals of Leicester identified difficulty finding appointment rooms as a contributor to missed appointments, estimating that a 5% reduction in missed appointments could save up to £672,000 annually.

Wayfinding design alone does not account for those missed appointments, but the example shows how a seemingly small navigation issue can have much wider impact.

From project to platform

This is why the idea of wayfinding as a finished design project becomes difficult to defend. Buildings change, tenants move and new uses emerge. Hospitals relocate departments and expand. Stadiums move between different modes of operation. The information people need to navigate these environments changes with them.

The alternative is to manage wayfinding systems as operational platforms. This does not necessarily mean buying a single piece of software. It means establishing a shared structure through which destination names, routes, maps and customer information are owned, governed, updated and distributed.

Good wayfinding design remains essential. It translates operational information into environments, signs, maps and interfaces that people can understand. But its long-term value depends on that information remaining accurate and the system being actively managed.

Getting the design right is no longer enough. The real test is whether an organisation can keep it right. Who owns the information? Who is accountable for change? And who makes the decisions that shape the customer experience?

Because the journey does not end when the signs go up.