Joanna Pawluk | What Hearing Loss Taught Me About Service Design

A yoga instructor in a village hall in Northamptonshire drew out every pose on a sheet of paper so that one person in her class could follow along. Twelve years later, Joanna Pawluk still remembers it.In this talk, Joanna traces a line from that piece of paper to the work she does today at Emirates, where she's mapping the end-to-end travel experience for customers who are deaf or hard of hearing.Along the way she makes a point most organisations miss: the people who experience the most friction become the best at hiding it. They build their own workarounds, they get from A to B, and the service looks like it's working fine.Drawing on her lived experience of hearing loss, desk research, social listening and workshops with frontline crew, Joanna shares how she built a service blueprint two metres long, and how she turned it into a reusable framework any team can apply.That framework flips the usual question. Instead of mapping every customer type, you ask one thing of every touchpoint: if a sense or an ability were removed here, would someone still get the same quality of service?Chapters00:00 Introduction: A Personal Story01:01 Cape Town, 2009: Teaching With a Globe02:32 Designing Something They'd Remember03:33 Living Between the Hearing and Deaf Worlds05:21 A Yoga Class in a Village Hall06:09 Rosa's Piece of Paper07:29 She Followed a Design Process Without Knowing It09:42 Travel: The Hardest Service Design Challenge10:51 People Who Experience Friction Hide It Best11:45 How Do You Know When to Board?13:31 Starting the Project at Emirates14:50 The Research Behind It17:42 Why Social Listening Tools Miss the Visual19:33 A Spectrum of Need, Not a Persona21:29 A Service Blueprint Two Metres Long23:49 A Reusable Framework for Any Team25:31 Closing: Stop Making People Adapt26:43 Q&A: Where Organisations Overlook Accessibility28:10 Q&A: Which Industries Lead and Which Lag29:35 Q&A: The Biggest Opportunities AheadResourcesJoanna Pawluk on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/joannampawluk/Emirateshttps://www.emirates.com/UX South Africahttps://uxsouthafrica.com/UXSA Online Eventshttps://uxsouthafrica.com/events/uxsa-2026-july-onlineSubscribe for more talks from UX South Africa featuring leading voices in UX, product design, research, service design and AI.