People can only use stairs they can find. If you can't find the thing you want to use, it's useless.

There is a trade-off here that's being glossed over. Features that are unobtrusive to the point of being hard to find initially are perfectly fine in a space that is meant to be used almost exclusively by people that have been there before, such as an office space. Those same designs are very poor choices if a large percentage of users of that space have not been there before or will likely not be there again any time soon.