A sign can be beautifully designed, perfectly manufactured and installed to the highest standard, and still fail.

If a visitor cannot see it when they need it, understand what it means, or trust that it gives them the right information, then, as far as that visitor is concerned, the sign may as well not exist.

That is the thinking behind “The Cost of Getting Lost”, a concept that highlights an often-overlooked reality of signage and wayfinding: the most expensive sign may be the one nobody sees.

In this article, Nastja Utrosa, Special Projects Lead at Modulex and PhD Candidate in Architecture at the University of Ljubljana, draws on her academic research and practical experience to explore what happens when environments fail to guide the people using them.

The Invisible Cost of Confusion

When businesses think about signage, the conversation often centres on aesthetics, branding, materials and installation costs. But according to Nastja, the real financial impact can begin long before someone reaches the point of sale.

“To me, it captures a paradox that research in environmental psychology and wayfinding has documented for decades,” she explains. “People will attribute their frustration to a place, a brand, or a service and not to a missing sign.”

A customer who cannot find the entrance to a shop may simply leave. Someone who cannot locate the right department may decide not to return. A visitor who struggles to find parking may arrive frustrated before they have even entered the building. The business may record a missed sale, a cancelled appointment or a poor review, but the signage failure that contributed to it is rarely identified.

“Businesses measure footfall and conversion rates, but they rarely ask the prior question: how many people never completed the route to get there in the first place?” says Nastja.

“That invisible drop-off is what ‘the cost of getting lost’ really refers to.”

When Getting Lost Becomes More Than an Inconvenience

The financial implications can be significant. Lost sales are the most obvious example, but they are only part of the picture. There is also the staff time spent giving directions, operational disruption when visitors arrive at the wrong location, and the longer-term effect on customer confidence and loyalty.

In healthcare environments, however, Nastja points out that the consequences can be considerably more serious.

“My fieldwork made clear that many visitors arriving at a hospital campus are not in a neutral state,” she says. “They are anxious, sometimes frightened, often accompanying someone unwell.” Under those circumstances, navigating a complicated environment becomes even harder.

“When wayfinding fails these visitors, the cost isn’t a lost purchase, but a missed appointment, a delayed treatment, or a family member arriving too late. That’s a cost that doesn’t appear in any revenue report.”

This illustrates why effective wayfinding should not simply be viewed as a commercial tool. In many environments, it is fundamental to how people experience and use a space.

A Sign Can Exist and Still Be Invisible

One of the most interesting aspects of effective signage is that visibility is not simply a matter of whether a sign is physically present. Nastja describes several reasons why a sign can become effectively invisible.

“Placement is the most common one. A sign positioned behind a decision point rather than before it arrives too late to influence behaviour.” This is an important distinction. A visitor doesn’t need information five seconds after they have made the wrong turn. They need it before they have to make the decision. Visual clutter can create another problem. In an environment already filled with signs, posters, advertisements and other visual information, simply adding more signage does not necessarily make things clearer.

“Then there is the question of legibility under real-world conditions,” Nastja adds. “Signs that read clearly in a design studio may be unreadable at pace, at an angle, or under variable lighting.”

And language matters too. A sign may be technically accurate but meaningless to the person reading it. Institutional terminology, internal department names or specialist language can create another layer of confusion.

“A sign pointing to ‘Ward 4B, Oncology Unit C’ means nothing to a first-time visitor looking for their relative’s treatment location,” she explains.

The lesson is simple: a sign needs to communicate with the person using the environment, not the organisation that owns it.

When Too Many Signs Make Things Worse

It is tempting to think that if people are getting lost, the answer is simply to add more signs. But effective wayfinding is not about quantity. It is about providing the right information at the right moment.

Nastja argues that placement and timing should take priority over visual design. “I would say that placement and timing are primary; design is secondary,” she says. “A well-placed, legible sign in a basic format will consistently outperform a beautifully designed sign in the wrong location.”

That doesn’t mean design is unimportant. Typography, colour, symbols, contrast and hierarchy all influence how quickly information can be understood. But these elements cannot compensate for poor positioning.

“The important variable is decision-point alignment, which means that a sign must appear at the exact moment a person needs to make a navigational choice, not before and not after.”

In other words, good signage anticipates the question a visitor is about to ask.

The Real-World Consequences of Getting it Wrong

Nastja’s own fieldwork across two hospital campuses provides a particularly clear illustration.

At one site, directional signage was insufficient, and the main entrances were not clearly marked. Visitors arriving at the campus could see the building, but could not easily determine where to enter. At another, a formal signage system was already in place, but it had become inconsistent over time.

“The same number appeared twice in the directory, each assigned to a different colour-coded zone,” Nastja recalls. For a first-time visitor, that kind of contradiction can be even more damaging than having no sign at all.

In both situations, visitors eventually relied on staff to find their way, highlighting another hidden cost: people become the signage system. Receptionists, porters, security staff and anyone wearing a uniform can find themselves repeatedly answering the same directional questions.

“Reception teams, porters, and anyone in a uniform become an unpaid ‘direct sign’,” says Nastja. “That time is real, recurring, and rarely measured.”

From Lost Visitors to Lost Revenue

So, can better signage actually generate a measurable return? Nastja believes it can. “Studies in retail environments have shown that improved wayfinding increases dwell time and average transaction value, because customers who can orient themselves confidently explore more of the space.”

The principle is intuitive. If customers know where they are and where they can go next, they are more likely to continue exploring. If they are uncertain, they may stop. For businesses looking to demonstrate the financial value of signage, Nastja suggests treating wayfinding as part of the customer route rather than as a separate design exercise.

“I would encourage a business owner to think in terms of conversion funnels: every stage of a customer’s route, from arrival to purchase, is a point where clarity (or confusion) determines whether they proceed.”

That makes signage part of the infrastructure supporting conversion. The question is no longer “Does our signage look good?” It becomes “Is our signage helping people complete the route we want them to make?”

Signage Doesn’t End at the Front Door

There is another part of the customer’s route that is increasingly important: what happens before someone arrives. Today, people often use Google Maps, Apple Maps, websites, and other digital tools to plan their routes. They may identify an entrance, locate parking and work out where they need to go before they even leave home.

Nastja’s fieldwork highlighted the importance of connecting this digital route with the physical environment. “Visitors, particularly patients, consistently used digital mapping tools before leaving home to plan their route, identify the entrance, and locate parking,” she says. That means the wayfinding experience can begin before someone has even reached the site.

“If the map is outdated, or the entrance it shows is not the one in use, the disorientation begins before they’ve even left their car.”

For organisations, this creates a new challenge. Digital directions and physical signage need to tell the same story. A visitor who is confidently directed to one entrance online and then arrives to find it closed is immediately forced to question everything else they have been told.

The Wayfinding System Needs an Owner

Perhaps the biggest mistake organisations make is not necessarily getting the original signage wrong. It is allowing the system to deteriorate. “The most pervasive mistake is treating signage as a one-time installation rather than a living system,” Nastja says.

Buildings change. Departments move. New entrances open. Temporary signs appear. Old signs remain. Digital information becomes outdated. Over time, these small changes can create a confusing and contradictory environment. The underlying problem, according to Nastja, is often organisational rather than technical.

“Signage rarely has a dedicated owner within an organisation. It sits between facilities management, marketing, and operations, and as a result falls through the gaps.”

That means even an excellent signage programme can gradually become ineffective if nobody is responsible for maintaining it.

Good wayfinding, therefore, requires governance as well as design: someone needs to monitor the system, review changes, remove obsolete information and ensure that new developments fit within the overall strategy.

Treating Signage as Infrastructure

Ultimately, Nastja believes the biggest shift businesses need to make is to stop thinking of signage as decoration. “Signage is not decoration; it is part of an infrastructure.”

Businesses would never consider a car park complete without thinking about drainage. They would not construct a building without structural calculations. Yet signage is sometimes treated as something that can be added at the end of a project.

But people need to navigate a building just as much as they need it to function. “Wayfinding directly affects how people experience and remember an environment, how long they stay, how much they spend, and whether they return,” Nastja explains.

That philosophy sits at the heart of the work carried out by Modulex, where signage and wayfinding are approached as an integral part of the built environment rather than simply a finishing touch. From strategy and wayfinding design through to signage solutions and implementation, the focus is on helping people navigate spaces with confidence.

Because ultimately, good wayfinding should feel almost invisible. Visitors shouldn’t have to think about the signs; they should simply know where to go. Verifind supports this goal by using eye-tracking and behaviour analysis to reveal where real people actually look as they navigate a space, identify where confusion occurs, and turn those behaviours into clear, evidence-based observations for better wayfinding.

The most expensive sign, after all, may not be the one that costs the most to manufacture or install. It may be the one that is there, but nobody sees.