Inclusive digital experiences through the lens of neurodiversity
Digging deeper to uncover the uniqueness of diverse user segments that can collectively help improve digital experiences for all
India is known across the world for its diversity. A land of many cultures, traditions and deep rooted knowledge systems that have harmoniously coexisted and progressed. As a service design agency based in India, we have been working intentionally towards helping global companies make sense and decode this growing opportunity-filled market. Through our projects we have had the opportunity to work across a wide diversity of users from varied cultures, geographies, socio-economic segments, education, marginalised communities as well as neurodiverse users. With the growing awareness, access and enhanced penetration of digital and internet services, concerns around building safe and truly inclusive, accessible services have become crucial. Global companies are now focusing on understanding the unique perceptions and behaviours of the highly diverse and varied spectrum of users from emerging markets to develop services that are built ‘for them’.
During our recent project that aimed at learning from a large diversity of users to understand their needs and challenges while interacting with digital products, we also interacted with a few neurodiverse participants. Through our secondary research and one-on-one in depth interviews with the neurodiverse participants, we gained a lot of nuanced insights and built our reflections from those learnings. Our interactions with these few users — 2 with dyslexia and 1 with OCD — has opened up a completely vast area of interest for us at Xeno and we are eager to work even more extensively in this space to be able to gain better understanding of the behaviors while making products and services truly accessible.
The primary observation was that the challenges faced by people with special cognitive needs can change and evolve to a large extent from time to time. Priya* who was diagnosed with OCD after a traumatic situation was so deeply affected by the intensity of her condition that it became a barrier for her even in daily tasks like using her mobile device. A certain trigger for her OCD was so sensitive that she had to lower her social media usage significantly and preferred to stay away from using her phone altogether. But recently, after being on medication and through more support systems her OCD condition had been managed to a large extent and she was able to use her phone as well as the digital services independently and easily.
Reflecting on this learning we realised that a lot of times a medical diagnosis can end up creating a very strong label and bucket for a person without taking into consideration the evolving nature of the cognitive needs that may actually be different for each person. This got us thinking: Labeling works for diagnostic purposes but should it transcend to a person’s lived experience?
In Priya’s case, her managed OCD condition allowed her to navigate through her daily tasks and do everything independently. But the stigma of being diagnosed with a condition amongst her relatives and social circles impacted her self confidence and made her limit herself. The people in her close circles who knew about her challenges viewed her from a static lens being oblivious to the change.
Such examples of labeling and categorising are not just limiting in understanding a person’s experience, but are also too static and may not take into consideration the evolution, growth and changing perceptions within a society with time. An intriguing example is that of how left-handed people were viewed in the past! In an influential book written in the 1940s by Abram Blau, a psychiatrist from New York City called The Master Hand: A study of the origin and meaning of left and right sidedness, warned that unless re-trained, left-handed children risked severe and life-long mental and cognitive deficits.
This view toward left-handedness is astounding today, especially considering that 10–15% of the people in the world are left hand dominant! Imagine being a left handed person born during that period and labeled as a disabled person — the impact of these societal perceptions can have lasting consequences, reflections of which last for generations!
Societal perceptions deeply penetrate through to the immediate circle of influencers and can have a huge impact on a person’s experience with their diagnosis and challenges they face. This ties in to the next observation that two people with the same disability can have extremely varied experiences and their overall relationship with their disability because of their immediate circle of influence. Listening to Sashi* and Rahul* (also participants in the same study) talk about their early challenges when they were diagnosed with dyslexia, to their journey of learning and adapting with the help of support systems that have helped them cope — gave us a deeper understanding on factors that influenced their personal experience, they way they learn and their subsequent use of digital products.
Sashi, a young boy currently in junior college, spoke very positively about his learning days from school and the support that he received from his teachers and counselers at school. The personal attention that he received from his teachers for things that he faced difficulties with and the tips and tricks that he was taught at school aided him in his reading challenges and had a very big influence on him developing an interest for learning. Along with a conducive school environment, Sashi shared many stories that showed that he had a very supportive and enriching support system even at home. Narrating stories of how his father spiked his interest in geography early on in life by sharing interesting facts and global news gave us a glimpse of the impact of good parenting on a child’s development. “My father used to tell me interesting facts about different places like a country where it snows for 6 months! I used to be so intrigued by that as here in Mumbai it is always so sunny. Hence I have always been fascinated by geography and I love reading about different places”.
Supportive and healthy relationships within the family, social circles as well as a supportive peer group had a big impact on his personal experience with dyslexia. He did not look at it as a disability nor did he feel like it was limiting him in any way. Looking at the difficulties because of dyslexia only as minor hindrances helped him find his own way, build his knowledge system with tips, tricks and work-arounds that helped him navigate and do everyday tasks like reading with ease. With his keen interest to learn new things along with the supportive environment he had at home, he was very driven to overcome the challenges he faced in terms of accessing information online due to dyslexia and found his own workarounds to be able to use digital products effectively thus becoming a highly engaged digital citizen.
Sashi experienced challenges with reading written content because of dyslexia but that did not lower his enthusiasm to learn new things and stay updated in any way. He followed knowledge sharing channels on YouTube and enjoyed watching their videos to learn about current affairs, global news and other informative topics. For him video as a format was very effective in learning about a topic in detail. He also followed various knowledge sharing pages on Instagram that posted interesting information in the form of animated gifs and infographics. This format of knowledge consumption was so powerful for him as it allowed him to stay updated without having to read text which was a challenging format because of dyslexia. Even though he struggled with reading, Sashi’s desire to stay updated and learn was so strong that when coming across text-heavy platforms or information, he had his own unique ways and tricks with using voice assistance to help him understand the information effectively
This struggle of reading for dyslexic users points to how common formats like written text can become a big barrier. Curious to know more, our research pointed us towards some unique initiatives and solutions that are trying to solve for this. Graphic designer Christian Boer who has dyslexia himself designed a dyslexia friendly font called Dyslexie. It is a typeface/font that was specifically designed with the intention of mitigating some of the issues that dyslexics experience when reading. Many of the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet are visually very similar making it the biggest barrier, the Dyslexie typeface emphasises the parts of the letter that are different from each other. Listen to Christian talk more about this in his TEDx talk. This is a simple yet powerful example of how intentional innovations designed with deeper contextual understanding of the user’s challenges can help to accurately and effectively land solutions.
Designing inclusive platforms for diverse audiences is not about rethinking how services have been designed to create exclusive services for them. That in its own way can lead to isolating marginalised communities furthermore to dangerously and wrongly convey that these products are not meant for you. Inclusivity hence, is more about evolving and improving the current digital experiences to make them frictionless and accessible to address everyone’s unique needs.
For example, in the post Covid digital world, a lot of human interactions are heavily text dependent. Take the simple example of WhatsApp messaging app. Right from educational institutions, work spaces, social and family interactions happen predominantly on this text messaging app. For someone with dyslexia this application of everyday use and interaction can become a very big barrier impacting their usage. WhatsApp does have accessibility features that can be turned on for specific needs but the discoverability and awareness especially for users who need these assisting features is low. Digital platforms need to find gaps- like how can the discoverability or number or steps needed to turn on accessibility features be reduced? How can information be directed towards our users rather than them having to fetch it? How can the app configure settings upfront rather than rely on the awareness and discoverability of an individual? These simple yet extremely essential workflow enhancements can truly help make digital experiences feel less daunting and more inclusive.
Accessibility improvements and making platforms more user friendly will definitely benefit someone like Sashi and Rahul with dyslexia, but it does not stay limited to only their experience. Everyone benefits from making a platform more accessible. Accessible design improves access to information on the web for individuals with and without disabilities. It helps expedite the delivery of information and services that can make digital experiences become less frustrating, confusing and inefficient.
It is also interesting to note the commonalities that exist amongst diverse user groups and leveraging them to enhance the experiences for all audiences. Our past work and in depth interactions with other user groups like the Next Billion Users and other marginalised communities, like women in rural India or the aged population, has shown how ease of discoverability and accessibility of information becomes a barrier in their digital experience. Challenges faced by these users are primarily driven by low tech exposure, language comprehension and low confidence and hence assisting features like voice assist, read aloud, font adjustments, on demand translations, etc. can truly change their end to end user experience. Past studies have also shown that video as a format is highly preferred by a lot of user types and they prefer to consume content in their local or regional language. Leveraging these cross segmental behaviors will be key in achieving better accessibility standards and making online experiences seamless for diverse users.
Relying on family members, peers and learning from them is a very common trait amongst these users. They often depend on being assisted by someone they trust and hence elevating the discoverability of these assist features can help them feel like they are being guided and supported through their digital workflows yet feel independent.
As a research and design community, it is our responsibility to dig deeper into such nuances and unique behaviors born out of the large diversity of our society without excluding anyone by design. We need to identify the cross-segmental user behaviours while designing products and services which can provide a seamless online experience for diverse users in this ever growing digital world.
*All participant names changed to maintain anonymity.
— Avani Tavargeri (Research Consultant, Xeno Co-lab)
