How do people find their way when there is no screen, no interface, and no back button?

UX practitioners are deeply familiar with designing flows, reducing cognitive load, and helping users make confident decisions in digital and mobile products. Those same challenges exist, often under far greater pressure, in large physical environments like stadiums, convention centers, museums, and major public events.

This session reframes wayfinding as a form of user experience design in the built world. Drawing on UX methods such as user research, journey mapping, behavioral observation, and mental model analysis, the talk explores how people navigate complex physical systems when distracted, stressed, or unfamiliar with their surroundings. Using examples from the Olympics, World Cup, Super Bowls, and large cultural institutions, I will show how UX principles traditionally applied to screens are used to shape intuitive, equitable, and confidence-building experiences at a massive scale.