This discussion about New Street reminds of of this book:
Don't Make Me Think. It's a classic book about website design that ought to be well known to most website designers. The book's main premise is that people, by their nature, are always in a hurry. They will almost always pick the first thing that looks like a solution to their problem. They won't read every single detail on a webpage. And therefore, a well designed web site won't expect them to: A well-designed web site will - just by how it's been laid out and visually designed - naturally lead people to click on the thing that does what they want to do.
It seems to me those principles apply equally to stations (and to almost any public building for that matter - with the difference that, compared to websites, it's much harder and phenomenally expensive to redesign buildings, so you'd better get it right first time). A good design intuitively leads people to where they need to go, without expecting them to read lots of posters first. It's pretty clear from the discussion here (and from my own experience of confusedly wandering round Birmingham New Street station, almost missing a train because I couldn't figure out where to go) that New Street massively fails that test. The tragedy of the New Street concourse etc. is that it wasn't built in the 19th century - it was built within the last 10 years off of a largely clean slate, at a time when 'don't-make-me-think' good design principles were very well known - and somehow the designers still managed to completely ignore passenger-usability.