UX isn't a property of screens.
It describes the quality of any interaction between a person and a system - digital, physical, or anything in between - and some of the most instructive examples come not from apps or websites but from the built world we move through every day. Here are nine of them.
Paving the way
The IKEA outdoor campaign by Mother London in 2019 repurposed advertising posters as directional signage, guiding customers to the store by the most sustainable route - on foot or by public transport.
The campaign worked partly because it didn't dictate; it offered. Users who wanted to drive still could. The campaign simply made the alternative visible, and many took it.
The lesson for digital design is about the difference between funnelling users and guiding them. Predefined workflows have their place, particularly where the product's goal depends on a specific sequence, but where genuine flexibility is possible, offering it signals that the product understands different users have different needs.
Shortcuts, alternative flows, and multiple paths to the same destination are not complications; they are recognitions that no two users arrive with identical contexts.
Giving users control
Self-checkout lanes changed the supermarket experience not primarily because they were faster, but because they handed control back to the user.
You could bag your items how you wanted, take the time you needed, and conduct the whole transaction without having to engage with another person. The underground turnstile does something similar: you choose your gate, you set your pace, and the system accommodates rather than directs.
Museum audio guides take this further still - they let users navigate exhibits in whatever order suits them, repeat sections they found interesting, and skip content they didn't.
The sense of ownership this creates over one's own experience through a space reduces frustration even when the underlying content is identical to a guided tour. In digital product design, the equivalent is building for autonomy: clear paths, but user-controlled traversal; structure without prescription.
Staying visible
Contactless payment terminals make all available modes visible at once - chip, tap, swipe - rather than revealing options sequentially.
Tube map signage uses size and weight to establish a clear visual hierarchy: the most important information is most prominent, less essential details recede without disappearing. Audiobook apps keep playback controls permanently on screen so users never have to hunt for the pause button in the middle of a chapter.
In each case, the principle is the same: the things users most frequently need are immediately accessible, without navigation or discovery.
Out of sight genuinely does mean out of mind, and for digital products this means being deliberate about what deserves persistent visibility versus what can reasonably live one level deeper.
Inclusive design benefits everyone
Kerb cuts - the sloped sections of pavement that allow wheelchair users to cross a road without a step - were designed for a specific need.
They also benefit parents with pushchairs, delivery workers with trolleys, cyclists, and anyone navigating with a temporary injury. What began as a reasonable accommodation for one group became an improvement to the experience for a much wider one.
This pattern - sometimes called the curb cut effect - is one of the more reliable arguments for inclusive design. Designing for the edges of the capability spectrum tends to make the experience better for everyone near the centre of it too.
In digital products, this means accessibility features like high contrast modes, keyboard navigation, and adjustable text sizes are not specialist additions but quality investments whose benefit diffuses across the entire user base.
Dual-function design
The revolving door solves two problems simultaneously: it allows people to enter and exit a building, and it prevents drafts - thermal curtain and entry mechanism in a single piece of hardware.
ATMs that offer balance checking, cheque deposits, and stamp purchases alongside cash withdrawal consolidate multiple tasks into a single touchpoint that users would otherwise have had to make separate trips for.
In digital products, the equivalent thinking asks: can this element do more than one thing without doing either thing worse? A progress bar that also shows estimated time remaining. An onboarding step that collects essential information and simultaneously demonstrates a core feature. Empty states that suggest a first action rather than simply confirming emptiness.
These are not feature additions; they are design decisions that extract more value from space already being used.
Reducing friction
Instant noodle pots require nothing except hot water - no pans, no utensils beyond a fork, no additional preparation.
Drive-throughs serve food without requiring the customer to leave their car. Both are examples of reducing the total number of steps between wanting something and having it, and the effect isn't just convenience; it's reduced cognitive load at the moment of decision.
For digital products, friction reduction is one of the most consistently high-impact areas of UX work. Every unnecessary step in a checkout flow, every form field that doesn't need to be there, every confirmation dialog that appears without a meaningful reason: these are costs paid by the user on behalf of the product.
Mapping every task from intention to completion and asking, at each step, whether it needs to be there is one of the more effective audits a design team can run.
Simplifying without losing
The modern television remote is a simplified version of something that once had dozens of buttons.
The reduction wasn't random; it was a prioritisation of what most users actually use most of the time, moving less-common functions into menus or secondary interfaces whilst keeping the essential controls immediately accessible. The result is a device that feels more capable, not less, because it's easier to use.
In digital products, the same principle applies: adding features does not always add value, and removing features does not always reduce it.
The question is which features actually serve users and at what frequency; the answer should determine what gets primary placement and what gets secondary or tertiary placement. Simplifying the main path whilst keeping full capability available elsewhere is usually the right balance, and finding it requires honest data about how the product is actually used.
Communicating beyond language
Road signs communicate meaning at speed and distance, without words, using shape and colour in combinations that have become culturally encoded.
Airport signage uses pictograms that function across language boundaries. Emojis operate as a communication layer that runs in parallel to text, extending meaning and tone in ways that written language often can't achieve as efficiently.
For digital products, this suggests a design principle worth taking seriously: symbol and imagery can carry meaning that copy can't always reach efficiently.
Not as replacements for clear language, but as supplements that reduce cognitive load and create recognition faster than text can. The caution is that symbols only work when they are genuinely shared; the truly universal symbol set is smaller than it sometimes appears, and a pictogram that seems obvious in one cultural context may be opaque or misleading in another.
Clarity of instruction
IKEA assembly instructions contain no words.
They use numbered diagrams that walk a person through construction one step at a time, with each diagram showing exactly one action and its result. The instructions work for most people not because furniture assembly is simple - it often isn't - but because the sequence is legible at every step, and the next action is always clear.
The digital equivalent is any interface that guides a user through a complex process without requiring them to hold the whole process in mind simultaneously.
Step-by-step flows with clear progress indicators, contextual help that appears when and where the relevant action is required, error messages that explain specifically what went wrong and what to do about it: all of these apply the same clarity of instruction that makes a flat-pack wardrobe achievable by someone who has never built one before.
The physical world has been solving UX problems for far longer than the digital one, and many of its solutions are transferable in principle even when they're not transferable in form.
The common thread across all nine examples here is attentiveness to what the person on the other side of the experience actually needs at each step - which is, ultimately, what the discipline is for.
