We like to pretend that users make decisions the way we design them to. That with enough clarity, logic, and polish, we can guide them down the golden path, step by elegant step.
But people aren’t rational. They’re reactive. Distracted. Pressured. Hungry. Anxious. Curious. Sometimes they’re all of those things at once. And yet we still expect them to behave like focused, obedient lab rats.
The design industry has long operated on the assumption that users follow logic. In reality, they follow feelings. And the gap between the two is where most of our UX debt lives.
Anxiety: The hidden architect of digital behaviour
When a user lands on a website looking for urgent help — say, cancelling a subscription, submitting a claim, or resetting a password — they’re often already emotionally loaded. Their heart is already racing before your homepage even loads.
Anxiety sharpens focus but narrows vision. Users in this state don’t explore. They scan. They fixate on keywords, button shapes, familiar patterns. They don’t care how clever your layout is or how many user journeys you’ve modelled — they just want the pain to stop.
This is where modal pop-ups, obscured CTAs, and jargon-filled copy backfire spectacularly. What seems like good UX hygiene under test conditions becomes a minefield when someone’s under pressure.
Designing for anxious users means reducing ambiguity, not just friction. It means prioritising visibility over hierarchy and using emotional validation as a UX principle, not just a marketing tool.
Urgency: Why users don’t behave in flow
Much of UX theory is built around the concept of a “happy path.” But real users rarely walk the happy path — they sprint, stumble, or zigzag their way through tasks based on urgency.
This is where the myth of rational navigation collapses.
Imagine a user trying to book a last-minute flight. Every second counts. They aren’t interested in your thoughtfully crafted breadcrumbs or feature-rich submenus. If the search field isn’t dominant, or if filters don’t feel intuitive, they’re gone.
This urgency leads to what look like “irrational” behaviours: skipping onboarding, rage clicking, or abandoning carts because the checkout took two steps too many. But these aren’t irrational — they’re emotionally logical. The system just failed to match their tempo.
Designing for urgency means building for acceleration, not just direction. Anticipate shortcuts. Offer graceful exits. Honour the impulse.
Frustration: The emotional breadcrumb trail
Nowhere is irrationality more visible than in user testing. We observe it all the time — users making decisions that fly in the face of expected flows, clicking the same thing five times, ignoring labels, misinterpreting icons.
Let’s take a fictional but familiar case:
A new health app is tested with midlife users who want to track blood pressure. The dashboard was designed with beautiful logic: measurements go under “Vitals,” historical data under “Insights,” help under “Support.”
But in testing, users repeatedly click on “Profile” expecting to find their medical records. When they don’t, they bounce — some muttering, some irritated, some completely convinced the app “just doesn’t work.”
The designers defend the IA. “It’s all clearly labelled!”
But that’s not the point. The user was frustrated. Frustration triggers mental shortcuts — and those shortcuts don’t follow your taxonomy. They follow emotional intuition.
Frustration isn’t a bug in the system. It’s a signal. A trail of breadcrumbs showing where expectation and reality diverge.
Conclusion: The case for emotionally empathetic UX
The idea that design should be rational is tidy, comforting… and wrong.
Users bring context. They bring urgency, baggage, pressure, hope, and resistance. And if we don’t design with those emotions in mind, we risk making experiences that feel unhelpful even when they are technically sound.
We need UX strategies that understand behaviour as lived, not imagined.
Test in stress conditions. Map emotional states as part of your persona development. Design for how people feel — not just how we wish they’d act.
Because rational design isn’t wrong — it’s just incomplete.