AUTISM: A PATIENT EXPERIENCE SUPERPOWER!

As SpellBound's User Experience Designer, my primary job is to advocate for users — all users, of every type and kind. But one of the most overlooked groups of diverse users across technology is neurodivergent people and more specifically, autistic people. Because autism can look so different in the spectrum from person to person, it's sometimes hard to understand what users really need. This is why my personal superpowers are so important in advocating for users of all types: I'm autistic.

While I didn't begin my official diagnosis journey until about six months ago, which is a long and expensive process that I'm sure many of you reading this can identify with, I've always known that my brain was significantly different from everyone else's brains. I learned to camouflage and mirror others from a very young age, and I masked so much that it's taken a lot of hard work to whittle down to who I really am without the masks. Learning about my own brain over the years has taught me a lot about what others with autism and related conditions, such as ADHD, go through in order to complete basic tasks. This not only helps me fine-tune my brain, but also the experiences that I help craft and shape with ARISE, our AR scavenger hunt game, before it gets released into the world.

For example, my experience with executive functioning helped shape how ARISE assigns tasks and quests to the player. Imagine the world as a messy desk: neurotypical people tend to group things, stacking them neatly in their minds and discarding anything they see as irrelevant. However, neurodivergent people usually notice everything at once and don't discard anything because to us, it's all relevant. That can be incredibly overwhelming, especially as a child when you haven't had enough practice in forcing your brain to organize and compartmentalize.

It's part of the reason why SpellBound utilizes research like executive functioning tasking when we build products like ARISE, because we know that roughly 4 tasks are all that a neurodivergent brain can reasonably process in detail, so we plan for that in order to make ARISE accessible for more children. AR games and technology have been proven to help kids with autism to learn a wide variety of skills, such as emotional regulation, motivation to complete tasks, and recognizing social cues.

For my fellow autistics: know that your brain is absolutely beautiful. Because you don't discard that extraneous information, you can see patterns and gain insights that most people cannot ever predict. You can learn to work with your differences and make them into your superpowers and be incredibly successful. You can change the world.

Let's go build awareness for just how aut-some we are. Happy Autism Awareness Month.