Cities as a User Interface

Cities, if you think about it, are a form of user interface.

The people who use, visit, or live in a city are the users. The interface is the physical environment itself—streets, buildings, signage, transit, sidewalks, benches, noise, green space, all of it. In much the same way a digital interface invites interaction through layout and responsiveness, the built environment of a city is something people have to navigate, interpret, and move through.

Rather than being a graphical user interface like you’d find in a digital product, this is a physical user interface—but it follows the same idea. People interact with it, move through it, hit friction points, find affordances, and develop mental models to help them navigate it.

Because they’re interacting with the physical interface, the city functions a lot like a digital device. You're engaging with systems of input and output—transit, public services, infrastructure—and your ability to understand and use those systems shapes how usable the city feels.

So, what happens when we treat urban and rural environments as user experiences?

UX in the Built World

Good urban design and good UX design share a lot of core goals:

• Make systems legible
  
  

• Reduce friction
  
  

• Guide behavior through clarity
  
  

• Anticipate edge cases
  
  

• Support autonomy while reducing error
  
  

A confusing transit map and a confusing app screen work the same way—they block access. A well-placed crosswalk or curb cut serves the same function as a well-labeled button. It communicates, “Yes, this is for you. You can go this way.”

And when people don’t feel that signal—when signage is missing, streets are hostile to pedestrians, or services are buried in bureaucracy—that’s bad UX. It might not look like a 404 error, but the effect is similar. A failure to connect.

Rural UX Is Real Too

This lens isn’t just for cities. Rural environments have their own design logic, often shaped less by density and more by access and distance.

Rural UX isn’t about walkability. It might be about navigability, resource availability, or even social dynamics. What does access look like when you’re 30 miles from the nearest clinic, or when broadband isn’t a given? How does trust flow in a place where institutions are distant but neighbors are close?

These places are interfaces too—they just operate on different rhythms and expectations. The core question remains the same: how easy is it for people to do what they need to do?

Designing with Behavior, Not Just Opinion

Instead of planning for urban change based just on surveys or policy studies, we should actually be treating it as a UI/UX problem.

We should be studying how people are actually interfacing with the city. Where are people really going—not just where they say they are going? What paths do they cut across a park? What corners do they crowd at bus stops, even if there’s no shelter? What do their patterns tell us that their words might not?

And further, you're not just listening to what people tell you they want and need. You’re looking for what their behavior is—what would flow naturally with how they already move through the space. What are the unspoken things, either you're assuming or they’re assuming, that you should be designing for?

That’s core to good UX. It’s about listening, but also watching. It’s about mapping not just expressed desires, but implicit needs.

How This Could Be Implemented

So what would it look like to apply this thinking on the ground?

A few practical steps:

• Conduct observational fieldwork in key public spaces—not just surveys, but real-time study of how people use transit stops, parks, crosswalks, or public buildings
  
  

• Map behavioral flows instead of just traffic flows. Where do people pause, redirect, cluster, or cut corners?
  
  

• Incorporate UX researchers into city planning teams, especially for public-facing programs and infrastructure projects
  
  

• Prototype urban changes the way you would prototype a new feature—using lightweight materials, temporary installations, or community pilots to see what works before scaling
  
  

• Audit signage, layout, and access like you would audit usability. Where are people getting confused or stuck, and what changes would clarify the experience?
  
  

Conclusion

Cities and towns are systems we use every day. They shape our routines, our stress levels, our sense of belonging—or disconnection. Thinking of the built environment as a user interface doesn’t reduce its complexity. It gives us a framework for understanding how it works, and how it breaks.

If we can design an app to make sense for a thousand users, we can apply the same principles to streets, parks, public buildings, and neighborhoods. The challenge is not technical. It’s attentional. We have to start looking at our environments not as static backdrops, but as living systems—interfaces that deserve to be legible, responsive, and humane.

Copyright © 2025 Ryan Badertscher. All rights reserved.