Moving to New York has made me pay attention to things I might previously have walked past without thinking twice.
Subway signs. Crosswalk signals. The way people form queues without anyone explaining where the queue begins. The tiny decisions involved in figuring out which direction to walk after exiting a station. When you’re new to a city, everyday activities involve an extraordinary amount of interpretation. You notice things that someone who’s lived there for years probably doesn’t think about anymore. And as someone interested in user experience, I find that fascinating.
A city gives you constant feedback.
Think about navigating a subway station. You enter with a goal: get from where you are to somewhere else. You look for signs, identify a platform, follow directional cues, and make decisions based on the information available. When the system works, the experience feels almost invisible.
When it doesn’t, you hesitate. You stop walking, check your phone, look around for another sign, or follow someone who seems more confident than you. I’ve started thinking about these moments as everyday examples of interface design.
A sign is an instruction. A platform indicator provides context. A crosswalk signal communicates system status. And the moment someone stops to figure out what they’re supposed to do next is an interesting opportunity to ask whether the design is providing enough information.
Familiarity changes everything.
Something else I’ve been thinking about is how different the same environment feels depending on how familiar you are with it. A person who uses the same subway route every day doesn’t need to read every sign. They already have a mental model of how the system works.
Someone using that route for the first time relies much more heavily on the cues around them. That’s also true of digital products. Designers can become so familiar with the things they’re building that they forget how much knowledge they’ve accumulated along the way. A navigation pattern that feels obvious after weeks of designing it might be completely unfamiliar to someone encountering it for the first time.
Good design helps you recover.
One thing I increasingly appreciate is that a good experience isn’t necessarily one where nobody ever makes a wrong turn. It’s one where people can recognize that something has gone wrong and recover without unnecessary effort. In a city, that might mean seeing a clear sign toward the opposite platform. In a digital product, it might mean an understandable error message, a visible back action, or a confirmation that explains what just happened. The principle is similar: help people regain their bearings.
Still learning the city.
I don’t think every observation needs to become a grand UX lesson. Sometimes a sign is just a sign, and sometimes I’ve simply taken the wrong exit. But living in New York has made me more aware of how much design exists outside screens. It’s in the systems we navigate, the information we interpret, and the decisions we make without consciously realizing how many decisions we’re making.
My current theory: A good designer should occasionally be a beginner at something. It’s a useful way to remember what uncertainty feels like.
