Whether you own a retail store or welcome patients or clients in your waiting room or lobby, your public spaces play a large role in creating your customers’ first impressions of your organization. Not only does your retail floor or waiting room need to be welcoming and beautiful, it must also be safe. Here are a few tips for creating healthy and inviting public spaces.
1. Keep It Light and Airy
People are like plants—they need light and clean air to thrive. Shopping, waiting rooms, and gathering areas with natural light and good air quality aren’t only inviting, they’re healthier than stuffy, dark rooms.
When designing your public spaces, take special care to incorporate natural light and fresh air. Allow as much light as possible to come through your windows by leaving them unobstructed and cleaning them regularly. Install an HVAC system that circulates fresh air through your space and removes stale indoor air. This will help keep the air healthy and improve indoor air quality.
2. Cut Down on Congregating
While cutting down on groups is essential during the pandemic, cutting down on crowds and bottlenecks in your space is always important for patron comfort. Think about where lines and groups are likely to form in your public space and come up with a plan to cut down on the congregating.
Some solutions include reducing the number of chairs in your lobby or cutting down on the amount of inventory in your display to create more room for people to spread out. Consider choosing antimicrobial surfaces for waiting room furniture, including upholstered chairs and couches.
3. Integrate Tech Tools
Before the pandemic, technology was making it easy to check-in for an appointment or pay for purchases without having close contact with an office administrator or cashier. Now, these contactless technologies are essential and are likely here to stay.
The design of your public spaces should incorporate how you’ll use these tools. If you plan to have people check in for their appointments on their phones while they wait in their cars, you’ll need a smaller lobby with fewer chairs. If you’ve adopted a contactless pay system for your retail store, you can shrink the size of your checkout counter to create more space for merchandise. The public expects lobbies, waiting rooms, and retail stores to be safe and comfortable. Work with the Master Builder to ensure you create a welcoming, safe place for everyone. Contact Scott Build today.
