[philjw]

We spend so much time in tech talking about UX, interfaces, and user adoption. But the most important interface we all use every day isn’t digital — it’s the street outside our door.

In most places, cycling is framed as sport or adventure: Type 2/3 “fun” at best (miserable in the moment, sometimes fun in retrospect). That’s not culture, that’s a design failure. A well-designed cycling system should be like a great interface: predictable, low-friction, boring in the best sense.

I wrote about why everyday cycling feels like Type 2/3 fun in most places, and how to make it Type 1 fun — calm, obvious, ordinary. To me, the parallels with UX are striking: adoption ladders, dark patterns, equity of access, and the invisible power of design choices.