  Recent advances in bottleneck studies have highlighted that different
architectural adjustments at the exit may reduce the probability of clogging at
the exit thereby enhancing the outflow of the individuals. However, those
studies are mostly limited to the controlled experiments with non-human
organisms or predictions models. Complementary data with human subjects to test
the model's limited in literature. This study aims to examine the effect of
different geometrical layouts at the exit towards the pedestrian flow via
controlled laboratory experiments with human participants. The experimental
setups involve pedestrian flow through 14 different geometrical configurations
that include different exit locations and obstacles near exit under normal and
slow running conditions. It was found that corner exit performed better than
middle exit under same obstacle condition. Further, it was observed that the
effectiveness of obstacle is sensitive to its size and distance from the exit.
Thus, with careful architectural adjustment within a standard escape area, a
substantial increase in outflow under normal and slow running conditions could
be achieved. However, it was also observed that placing the obstacle too close
to the exit can reduce outflow under both normal and slow running conditions.
Moreover, we could not observe "faster-is-slower" effect under slow running
condition and instead noticed "faster-is-faster" effect. In addition, the power
law fitted headway distribution demonstrated that any architectural
configurations that enhanced the outflow have higher exponent value compared to
the other configuration that negates the outflow.
