The Schedule - AI Planner for Autistic Adults Mobile App
Old habits die hard, but we do need to specify a little bit differently when designing for neurodiversity. We used a guide from the United Kingdom Home Office to make sure that our designs are easily followable for autistic adults.
Two of the design habits that we needed to shed were:
Providing too many options on the screen. While this is in itself a bad design practice on mobile, it was a design decision that is quite often made, especially at the behest of clients. We needed to consciously shed this habit and make things simple — extremely so.
Using words that are not too descriptive to denote actions. Creating a rose-tinted glass between users and the product may create a more delightful experience, but this may not work for autistic users. The buttons were made very direct and the layout very consistent.
We realized that these UX choices would detract from the overall user experience. Consequently, we aimed for a design that is simple but well-built, easy to use and future-proof, as our vision for the entire company suggests.
When designing for this, we also made a decision to be very conscious with the language we used. We looked around and found this guideline by the UK National Health Service about the language used by service providers when talking with and about autistic people.
To learn more about our design process, check out the full case study on Behance. We hope that this case study is educational, and we'd also love to be educated more. What do you think we did right, and what do you think can be improved? Let us know in the comments 👇
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Maturis is a UI/UX design lab specializing in creating balanced, future-proof products where business needs and user considerations are both met. We are a team of professional, hard-working UX designers & researchers, visual designers, and branding experts. Nice to meet you!
Get in touch with us at maturisdesignlab@gmail.com.