Simplicity, clarity, control, support, co-creation

Nielsen Norman Group's five neuroinclusive principles are simplicity, clarity, control, support and co-creation. Stated as a list they are hard to argue with and hard to act on.

Applied to one real workflow, they stop being abstract. Take a multi-step approval flow, which almost every enterprise product has, and run the list against it.

Simplicity: counting what has to be held in mind

Walk the flow and count the pieces of information a person must remember that are not currently on screen. In a typical approval flow the answer is three or four: which items are selected, which filter produced them, what the previous approver said, and what happens to items that fall outside the current page.

Each of those is a candidate for being made visible rather than remembered. A persistent summary strip carrying the selection count and the active filter removes two of them at once.

Clarity: auditing the vocabulary

List every noun and verb the flow uses for the same object and action. Approval flows tend to accumulate request, submission, item and record for one thing, and approve, confirm, authorise and sign off for one action.

Pick one of each and change the rest. This is the cheapest intervention on the list and it is almost always deferred, because each individual inconsistency looks trivial.

Control: finding what commits without asking

Identify every point where a choice takes effect on selection rather than on confirmation, and every timer the user did not set. Session expiry with no warning, an approval that fires on a row click, and a queue that reorders itself while being read all remove control.

A persistent summary strip carrying the selection count and the active filter removes two memory demands at once.

BrilliantUX editorial principle

Support: putting the help at the difficulty

Mark the one or two moments in the flow where people hesitate, which the support tickets will already tell you. Support means an inline explanation at that exact point. A link to documentation is a referral rather than support.

Co-creation: changing who is in the session

The last principle is the only one that is about process rather than interface. It means neurodivergent people are participants in the research and are present when the design decisions get made, rather than being represented by a persona written about them.

It is also the principle most likely to change what the other four produce, because the memory demands and the vocabulary problems that a team guesses at are rarely the ones that turn out to matter.