What Designers Can Learn From the London Tube Map

Sometimes spatial accuracy doesn’t matter.

Michael Beirut is a world-renowned graphic designer and design educator. He teaches graphic design at the Yale School of Art and the cofounder of the website Design Observer. In March 2018, he shared an idea through TED about the story of the London Tube Map, as we know it today. In the process of telling the story of the London Tube Map, he unveiled an idea that could be very powerful for designers to understand.

“The London Underground came together in 1908, when eight different independent railways merged to create a single system. They needed a map to represent that system so people would know where to ride. The map they made is complicated. You can see rivers, bodies of water, trees and parks — the stations were all crammed together at the center of the map, and out in the periphery, there were some that couldn’t even fit on the map. So the map was geographically accurate, but maybe not so useful.” — Michael Beirut

Michael Beirut | The Genius of the London Tube Map | March 2018

“Enter Harry Beck. Harry Beck was a 29-year-old engineering draftsman who had been working on and off for the London Underground. And he had a key insight, and that was that people riding underground in trains don’t really care what’s happening aboveground. They just want to get from station to station — “Where do I get on? Where do I get off?” It’s the system that’s important, not the geography.” — Michael Beirut

The powerful idea that Michael Beirut unveiled wasn’t simply that the geography of maps didn’t matter to train riders. It was the fact that sometimes accurate information doesn’t matter to users. Consider the progress bar. Most UX designers know that the progress bar doesn’t need to be an accurate representation of how much progress has been made. The progress bar is more of a tool to keep users captivated or set their minds at ease as they wait for something to download or upload or the like. The London Tube Map example is exactly the same concept. Users don’t need to know the precise geographic location of their stop as it exists within a traditional map. They simply need to know when their stop is relative to other stops.

The question that follows is what else can we apply this logic to? Michael Beirut finishes his Talk with three principles to extract from the London Tube Map example and apply to other design problems.