For interacting with humans, I rarely expose a UUID directly. I'm not particularly bothered about ugly URLs but I don't work in an industry where SEO is relevan

For interacting with humans, I rarely expose a UUID directly. I'm not particularly bothered about ugly URLs but I don't work in an industry where SEO is relevant. As you suggest, I sometimes incorporate type information into the ID to convey a bit more context, often in the form of a URL (org.com/customer/xxxxx). If you do need to put a UUID in the UI, depending on the constraints of the application, it might make sense to just display the first group of characters from the UUID and separately handle the very rare collisions you may encounter, similar to git and its short SHAs. For any situation where there will be transcription or copying IDs between systems manually, I will typically add another group that incorporates some metadata about where the ID came from (similar to the type code you mention) and a check digit, but obviously I try to avoid any situation that involves transcribing a UUID.