Understanding the foundations of adaptive design

Reader's noteReader's note

This is part 1 of a two-part series that explores why accessibility must evolve to embrace neurodiversity, and how emerging technologies are making truly adaptive design possible for the first time. Part 2 here.

Part 1Part 1

The myth of the normal user

In the 1960s and 70s, automotive engineers began using crash test dummies to improve vehicle safety. For decades, these dummies represented one specific body type: a 50th percentile male, roughly 175 cm (5’9”) and about 78 kg (170 pounds). As a result, cars continued to be optimized for one particular physiology, while women, children, and in fact anyone with a different body type faced higher injury and fatality rates in accidents.

Even though efforts at diversification increased from the beginning of the 21st century, there is still no clear standard or effective legislation mandating a more representative way to test the safety of cars. This continues to cost lives that could have been saved had we designed for variability from the start.

This same pattern plays out in digital design today. We design for a mythical “normal user” and treat everyone else as edge cases to be accommodated later, if at all. Historically, accessibility efforts have focused primarily on physical and sensory disabilities, such as mobility, vision, and hearing, while paying far less attention to cognitive diversity.

But what if there is no normal user. What if the way we think, process information, and navigate the world varies as much as our physical bodies? And what if designing for this cognitive variability is not only more ethical, but also fundamentally better for everyone?

Defining the territory

Let's establish some shared language.

• Accessibility is the practice of ensuring that products, services, and environments can be used by all people, regardless of their abilities. Historically, accessibility has focused on what we might call “visible” disabilities, such as providing ramps for wheelchair users, captions for deaf people, and screen readers for blind people. These are critical and necessary. But accessibility has often overlooked the invisible: the cognitive, attentional, and sensory processing differences that affect how people think, learn, and interact with the world.
• Neurodiversity refers to the natural variation in human cognitive functioning. It includes conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and others, but the term itself carries an important assumption. These are differences rather than deficits. Neurodiverse ways of processing information are part of the spectrum of human experience, not aberrations from a norm.
• Neuro-inclusivity extends accessibility to explicitly include neurodivergent ways of thinking and processing. It recognises that the same interface that works beautifully for a neurotypical user might be overwhelming, confusing, or impossible for someone with ADHD, autism, or dyslexia. It commits to designing systems that work for both.
• Access, then, is the outcome: the ability to participate, to achieve goals, and to be independent. Access is not a feature you bolt on at the end of a project. It is the fundamental point of design itself.

Who is responsible for access?

The traditional answer has been: the person who needs it. If you are blind, you learn to use a screen reader. If you have ADHD, you develop coping strategies. If you are autistic, you mask your way through social situations designed for neurotypical people. If you have dyslexia, you work twice as hard to read interfaces that were not built with you in mind. This places the burden of adaptation entirely on the individual, often the very individuals with the fewest resources to bear it. It is expensive, exhausting, and unfair.

The truth is that access is a systemic responsibility. It belongs to designers, developers, product managers, business leaders, and policymakers. When we design systems that only work for certain kinds of brains, we are making an active choice about who gets to participate. Lack of accessibility is a design and policy failure.

There is also an important secondary effect. When accessibility efforts focus primarily on physical and sensory disabilities, they can reinforce the idea that cognitive differences are personal problems to be overcome rather than design challenges to be solved. This is why neuro-inclusivity must become a core pillar of accessibility work rather than an afterthought.

The myth of the normal user

When we think of these crash test dummies, the problem was the assumption that designing for the average would work well enough for everyone. In reality, it worked catastrophically poorly for large portions of the population. The same logic shapes digital design. We create personas of “typical users” with typical attention spans, typical reading speeds, typical sensory thresholds, and typical executive function. We design interfaces, flows, and experiences that assume these capabilities are universal.

But they’re not: roughly 15 to 20 per cent of the population is neurodiverse. That is not a fringe group. It is roughly one in five people. Even within the same diagnosis, needs vary widely. Not all autistic people have the same sensory sensitivities. Not all people with ADHD struggle with the same executive function tasks. Diagnosis categories are useful for medical and support purposes, but they are weak design inputs because they obscure the granularity of human experience.

Everyone’s needs change depending on context. You might not have a diagnosed attention deficit, but maintaining focus on a complex task becomes difficult when you are sleep-deprived, anxious, or dealing with a crying baby in the next room. You might not have dyslexia, but reading small text on a bouncing bus or a sun-drenched screen still becomes hard work. Your executive function might be strong most of the time, but collapse when you are overwhelmed or stressed. You might not have sensory processing challenges, but navigating a cluttered interface under time pressure can still be exhausting.

Diverse needs are not static. They are contextual, situational, and universal. The person you design for today might be you tomorrow. When you genuinely design for this variability, when you make your interface tolerant of divided attention, your text readable under stress, and your navigation forgiving of mistakes, you do not only support neurodiverse users. You support everyone. This is not a zero-sum game. Accessibility is not a favour to a minority at the expense of the majority. It is designing for the full range of human experience, which benefits all of us.

Consider access ramps. They were designed for wheelchair users, but they benefit people with pushchairs, rolling suitcases, delivery carts, bicycles, and anyone who finds steps difficult. They are simply good design. The same principle applies to neuro-inclusive design. When you design for cognitive variability, you create more forgiving, more flexible, and more humane systems that work better for everyone.

The business case for neuro-inclusive access

The neurodiverse population actually represents significant market share and untapped talent. In technology and creative industries, the very sectors most responsible for shaping digital experiences, neurodiverse individuals are overrepresented.

What happens when people cannot participate? They leave. They go to competitors. They create workarounds that fragment your user base. They burn out. In employment contexts, inaccessible systems lead to higher turnover, lower productivity, and an organisational culture that rewards conformity over capability.

The business impact scales across organisational levels.

• At the individual level, inaccessible design creates friction in every interaction: extra time, extra cognitive load, and extra frustration. A form that does not save progress forces someone with ADHD to restart repeatedly. An interface with poor contrast causes someone with visual processing differences to strain and fatigue. These micro-frictions add up.
• At the team level, inaccessibility creates dependency and bottlenecks when neurodiverse team members need workarounds or accommodations that were not designed in. It slows collaboration and creates invisible labour that does not appear in productivity metrics but drains organisational energy.
• At the organizational level, it limits innovation because you are not benefiting from neurodiverse perspectives. It also creates reputational risk. Talented individuals share their experiences, and organisations that fail at inclusion earn reputations that make recruitment harder.
• At the market level, you shrink your addressable audience and give competitors an opening. When 15 to 20 per cent of potential users cannot easily use your product, that is not a small accessibility problem, it is a strategic vulnerability.

Broadening access is not a charitable expense. It is a strategic investment with measurable returns: increased market reach, better retention, stronger team performance, and more resilient products.

Technology is introducing a fundamental shift

We are entering an era where truly adaptive, neuro-inclusive design is becoming technically feasible in ways it never has been before. For decades, we have built static systems. An interface looks the same for everyone. A workflow follows the same steps regardless of who is using it. Users adapt to the system because the system cannot adapt to them. Technology is now evolving in ways that change this equation.

First, AI is enabling systems to be adaptive rather than fixed. Instead of one interface or one type of content for all users, systems can learn and adjust based on individual needs and contexts.

Second, immersive technology and sensors are making every experience digitally infused. Digital interaction is becoming a layer woven into physical space that responds to where you are, what you are doing, and what you need.

As a result, design is moving beyond the surface. We are no longer only designing buttons and layouts. We are designing the data structures, logic, and system behaviours that determine whether experiences can be flexible and accessible at all.

The possibility of systems that adapt to users rather than forcing users to adapt to systems is no longer theoretical. It is within reach, and it will massively impact the way we design and build experiences in the coming years.

What this means for you

Whether you are a designer, developer, product manager, business leader, or policymaker, the message is the same. The domain of accessibility is expanding to include neurodiversity, and the application of accessibility is expanding across the entire stack.

This means:

• Questioning assumptions about “normal” users and typical use cases
• Designing for flexibility rather than prescribing a single “right” way to complete tasks
• Measuring access as a core success metric alongside speed, efficiency, and engagement
• Advocating for inclusive practices in your organisation, even when the process is uncomfortable or slow⠀

The future of design is about creating resilient systems that work for the messy, variable, contextual reality of being human.

In part 2, we will explore what this means technically and systematically for designers and technologists building the next generation of products and services. We will examine how emerging technologies require us to think about design at multiple layers simultaneously and outline a framework for building truly adaptive systems. It starts with a commitment to seeing cognitive diversity as an opportunity to deliver better design for everyone.