This article is a long-overdue follow-up to the one I wrote in 2019, “If you want to change the world, hire more Autistic UX designers.“
If you want your AI product to stand out in the veritable sea of others, you need autistic minds to help you design it. 🕵️
Good, human UX is your moat, and the key differentiator that will make a customer choose your Product over all the others that will pop up and breed like rabbits over the next few years. 🐘
Every new leap in AI is a paradigm shift — a different way of seeing the world. Very soon, it won’t be about faster or more data processing but nuance in how we interpret and interact with information. It already is for those of us in the weeds. 🍁
That’s where the unique skills a neurodiverse person offers will become game-changers for your business. 🚀
Individuals on the autistic spectrum have an exceptional ability for pattern recognition, intense eyes for detail, and a profoundly ingrained aptitude for unconventional problem-solving. 🏆
It takes a highly methodological mind to understand AI capabilities and development. There are subtle data patterns to catch that will make all the difference in identifying opportunities that will take an experience to the next level, making it that much more human, seamless, and intuitive. 📊
Sometimes, it’s hard for me to believe that we live in a world where designing a human experience will be revolutionary, but that is exactly where we are. We built technology to replace human tasks and thinking, and now we want to shape it into something that complements us and enhances our lives — by understanding human psychology. Perhaps understand us better than we understand ourselves. 🦾
Creepy, I know. 🐛
Herein lies the irony of AI. In the quest to automate, we’ve reasserted humanity's irreplaceable values. 🤲
Autistic individuals can see through the noise of big data to find opportunities for human threads that deeply resonate and connect us on a fundamental level, not just mimic us. 👀
You know why they can do that? Because they’ve had to do it all of their lives. An autistic person has had to learn and memorize millions of individual scenarios, interactions, causes, and effects — because every experience is different. 🔬
They cannot infer that a specific outcome will happen because something they’ve experienced in the past is similar to what they’re experiencing now. It has to be precisely the same. 🔁
Sound familiar? 🧩
All that said, these superpowers come with their kryptonite.
Can you guess what that is?
Let’s look again at some of an autistic designer’s…
🦸♀️ SUPERPOWERS 🦸♂️
- 🟠 Focused open-mindedness: Perhaps the most valuable and unique skill an autistic mind has is the ability to analyze and understand different perspectives from a less biased place. Invaluable skill for UX Research. 🔑
- 🟠 Pattern recognition: Autistic individuals often see patterns where others see chaos. This isn’t just useful; it’s revolutionary for AI, where recognizing subtle data patterns can lead to breakthroughs in machine learning. 📈
- 🟠 Attention to detail: AI is precise, man. Who better to design it than someone who notices all the details other people miss? 🕵️
- 🟠 Next-level critical thinking and creative problem solving: The ability to ask the right questions and approach problems from completely novel angles is exactly what’s needed to push AI beyond it’s limits. 🚀
- 🟠 Hyperfocus and dedication: When an autistic designer focuses on a task or a problem, they dive deep. They will find problems and solutions others won’t because they can — and they genuinely want to. 🤿
- 🟠 Empathy in design: Having often navigated a world not built for them, autistic designers inherently design with deep empathy. (Ironic, seeing how people view individuals with autism as not having empathy. It’s simply not true.) They seek to design experiences that are thoughtful, considerate, and inclusive.
- 🟠 Heightened awareness of bias: Having faced bias and experienced watching the world from an ‘outsider’ perspective, autistic designers are best-positioned and conditioned to be aware of bias and champion spotting and stopping the perpetuation of societal biases through technology.
🦠 KRYPTONITE 🦠
OK, so what’s the catch?
These skills require accommodations on your end to work. 🚨
Thinking and understanding require time. You may not think you have time, but you really, really need to make it if you want to build the right thing. 🤌🏼
If you don’t give your neurodiverse designers enough time, resources, or data to understand the details and the bigger picture from multiple perspectives, they will not be able to do their magic. 🧙🏾
But if you can provide safety, transparency, organization, patience, repetition, and collaboration…⬇️
Incorporating neurodiversity into your AI design team IS your strategic advantage. 💥
Seek these brilliant designers out. Thank me later. 🫡
And thank you for reading! 🙏
Signing off,
-RB
