February 26, 2026
35% of Professionals Say User Emotions Are the Most Ignored Factor in Service Design
New global research from Designit, Wipro’s experience innovation company, has put a number on something many in the industry have long sensed: 35% of design professionals say that the emotional states of users are the most overlooked factor in service design today.
Invisible failure points came in second, flagged by 33% of respondents. Cross-channel consistency was cited by 21%, while just 10% pointed to execution incentives as the primary blind spot.
While organisations have spent years connecting systems, streamlining journeys, and rolling out automation, they have been slower to reckon with a fundamental truth, which is that people do not arrive at a service in a calm, neutral state. They arrive frustrated, anxious, rushed, or uncertain, and those emotional conditions shape everything about how they interact with that service.
Efficiency Is Not the Same as Understanding
A person contacting their bank after spotting an unrecognised transaction is in a very different headspace from someone casually browsing mortgage rates. Meanwhile, a commuter trying to rebook a cancelled train is not the same customer as someone planning a trip weeks in advance. And yet most service design still maps these interactions as if users are rational, patient, and operating under ideal conditions.
Madeline Kossakowski, Executive Experience Design Director at Designit, says: “The industry has become incredibly good at connecting systems and touchpoints, but connection doesn’t automatically create understanding. If we design primarily for efficiency, we risk scaling friction rather than reducing it.”
Understanding what drives customer perception is the foundation of any experience that genuinely works for people.
The Empathy Gap Starts Earlier Than We Thought
Designit has been tracking related issues across several studies. Earlier work explored the rise of context-aware systems in CX, while a more recent study examined AI-driven customer support and found notable differences in empathy and contextual understanding in automated interactions. The new findings add a critical piece of context: those empathy gaps do not originate in the technology, but much earlier, in the assumptions that underpin how services are designed in the first place.
The traditional tools of service design, like static personas and linear journey maps, are useful for structuring thinking, but they struggle to reflect how human behaviour changes under pressure. When someone is stressed, uncertain, or in a hurry, the logical pathways designed for calm, focused users can quickly become obstacles.
Designing for Real Behaviour
Designit’s proposed response to this challenge is a framework they call Mindset Archetypes. Rather than grouping users by demographics or typical behaviours, this approach asks designers to consider the deeper forces shaping how someone shows up in any given moment: their values, motivations, and the situational pressures they are carrying.
Kossakowski explains: “When you understand that ‘why’, you can design services that are resilient, adaptive, and capable of building trust over time. If we don’t design for shifting emotions and mindsets at the service level, no amount of technology can compensate for that gap.”
This kind of human-centred thinking is increasingly visible in Designit’s own project work. The company’s collaboration with JFK Terminal 4 is a strong example of what it looks like in practice. Rather than optimising purely for throughput, the team focused on creating a consistent, emotionally coherent experience for passengers, employees, airlines, and business partners, recognising that each group arrives at the terminal with different pressures and expectations.
Organisations across sectors are currently investing heavily in AI and digital transformation, often with the goal of reducing costs and improving speed. But if the underlying service design does not account for how real people feel in real situations, the technology built on top of it will simply scale the same blind spots further and faster.
