Unemotional Design

Dr Temple Grandin is an Associate Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. She’s also a high functioning autistic. Her writings on the nature of autism have provided me with lots of interesting food for thought over the last couple of years since Megan’s diagnosis.

I recently read a fascinating article on her web site entitled My Mind is a Web Browser: How People with Autism Think. It provides an interesting viewpoint into the mechanics of cognition and thought process from an autistic perspective. It also started me thinking about the emotion associated with design and how it leads us to percieve the world around us. Autistic people find it very difficult to associate concepts with emotions:

Only by interviewing…(non autistic)… people did I learn that many of them think primarily in words, and that their thoughts are linked to emotion. In my brain, words act as a narrator for the visual images in my imagination.

Leaving aside the thorny issue of how we as designers should come to terms with the possibility that by creating interfaces designed to stimulate an emotional response we are possibly excluding a whole range of people, the more exciting possibility is that there may finally be a way to get a truly impartial test group for web site usability testings. What I’m suggesting is that if some autistic people are unable to easily (or even in some cases at all) associate concepts with emotions or have any kind of emotional response to a concept then we have a set of people that can give us totally impartial, unemotional, honest feedback on how usable our designs are.

Researchers have learned that people with autism have a decreased metabolism in the area in the frontal cortex that connects the brain’s emotional centers with higher thinking (the anterior cingulate)…[T]he emotion center in their amygdala is not activated, for example, when they judge expressions in another person’s eyes.

The trouble with NT users (NeuroTypical, the term autistic people use to describe non-autistics) is that we’re incapable of ignoring the impulses from the amygdala – we are emotional and design, either good or bad, will provoke an emotional response in NT’s. How many of you have been sorely tempted to leave in a stylistic element because it look great when you know it distracts from the impetus of the overall design or impacts negatively on the usability of the site? I know I have.

Obviously, I have to declare an interest in autism since my daughter is autistic. Because of this I know from experience that autistic people, like NT people, come in varying shapes and sizes – and abilities. I’d recommend that all designers think about employing some high functioning autistic people next time usability testing is needed. We’re talking about a group of people who are very analytical, very literal, very honest and won’t be swayed by the emotional hooks you used.

Don’t expect a lot of tact, autistic people don’t see the point of tact. You can however, expect a great deal of high quality feedback I’d think.