Amanda and I designed a workshop. We’ve never met in person but we met through our firm belief in the art of collaboration and community.
I spoke with Amanda, as I was drawn to a heartfelt post where she shared her struggle with transitioning from teaching into design, but even with my decades of experience in user experience she shared insights with me about neurodiversity and it made me reflect that I had gaps in my knowledge.
We decided to create this opportunity to share insights on neurodiversity because we trust this knowledge has the potential to support us to create more mindful experiences and interactions wherever we work and live.
Amanda has worked in education for over a decade teaching French, and she's now transitioned into user experience, both as a designer and a user researcher.
In our workshop, with special thanks to Angela Rees-Collins and Neil Burn, we came up with some starting principles for universal design for user experience. We’ll be inviting further iteration and reflection on these, but in the meantime, here are our working set of universal design principles: 1. Be open to how others think in the evaluation of detail and what that could uncover creatively 2. Ensure psychological safety by being aware of the discomfort and triggers in yourself and others 3. Design with cognitive load and capacity in mind 4. Be adaptable and explore user needs to dive beyond any code-switching and masking that there might be due to discomfort 5. Be empathic to environmental and physically related user needs to reduce stress For context, we now invite you to empathise, watch and listen to Amanda’s reflections on neurodiversity. You can also access our slides from the workshop to which we’ve added suggested reading resources such as the book NeuroTribes by Steve Sliberman, which Amanda personally recommends.
