Designing for executive function

Nielsen Norman Group set out five neuroinclusive design principles in September 2026: simplicity, clarity, control, support and co-creation.

Read as an accommodations checklist, they sound like a late-stage review item. Read as a systems brief, they describe most of what enterprise software gets wrong for every user, and the reason the list is worth taking seriously is that the failures it names are not edge cases.

Reading the list as a brief rather than a checklist

Simplicity is not the absence of features. In an enterprise tool it means that any single screen asks a person to hold one thing in working memory rather than four. A bulk action that requires a user to remember which filter is applied, which rows are selected, which of two selection modes is active, and what the action will do to rows outside the current page is asking for four simultaneous states to be tracked. That is a working memory problem before it is a layout problem.

Clarity is about the vocabulary the product teaches. A product that calls the same object a record, an entry and an item across three screens has made the user maintain a translation table.

Control is the ability to stop, reverse and adjust pace. Autoplaying content, timed sessions that expire without warning, and actions that commit on selection rather than on confirmation all remove it.

Support means the help is where the difficulty is, not in a documentation site. Inline explanation at the point of a hard decision is support. A link to a knowledge base is a referral.

Co-creation is the one that changes how a team works rather than what it ships. It means neurodivergent people are in the research sessions and in the room where the decisions get made, rather than being represented by a persona.

Finding the executive function load in a workflow

The practical method is to walk a real workflow and mark every point where the interface requires a person to hold information that is not currently on screen. That list is usually short and specific, and it is almost always longer than the team expects.

The usual offenders in enterprise software are multi-step wizards that hide earlier answers, filters that persist invisibly across views, confirmation dialogs that describe the action in different words than the button that triggered it, and any flow where the consequence of a choice becomes visible only after the choice is committed.

A design that reduces the amount a person has to hold in mind is not a simplification. It is the product doing work it was always supposed to do.

BrilliantUX editorial principle

Making the fixes structural

Most of the remedies are ordinary design system work rather than special cases. Persistent state summaries, so the current filter and selection are always visible. Confirmation copy that repeats the exact noun and verb of the action. Undo on every destructive action rather than a warning before it. Pacing controls on anything that moves.

Handled in the design system, these apply everywhere at once and cost nothing per screen. Handled as accommodations, they get applied to the one flow that was audited and to nothing else, which is how accessibility work ends up feeling expensive.