Published on 13 June 2024 • Written by Dr Lisa Colledge
When Creative Consultant Merina Burda and I built my website in 2024, we used neurodivergent experience to help us identify unnecessary barriers to finding, reading, and engaging with the content.
Here, Merina reflects on what that process taught her about design, the choices she reconsidered, and what she would take into future projects.
Three key takeaways
Design for wider benefit: neurodivergent experience can reveal barriers that conventional design choices overlook. Addressing those barriers helps create an environment where different people can engage more easily – the principle behind neuro-inspired design.
Simplicity and focus: keep focused on the core audience and function of the website as you design it. It’s easy to be enthused by new functionalities offered by the website-buidling platforms, such as animations and sliding panes, but consider whether they really serve your needs. A simple, clean, uncluttered website might serve your needs better.
Learn, iterate and adapt: keep on learning, and be willing to rework elements as you gain new insights.
Our starting point was to make it easier for visitors to focus on the ideas while giving the website a distinctive visual identity. That involved considering how typography, layout, movement, and navigation affected the effort needed to engage with the content.
I shared an article about the design choices we made. The positive feedback we received suggested that visitors appreciated the clarity, as this comment illustrates:
“The site is very clean, uncluttered and straight forward. It’s very easy to navigate and right away makes it clear what it’s about.” Opal Pitzler
That feedback was encouraging, while leaving plenty of room to learn. We have continued to develop the website, drawing on feedback and new insights about both the content and its presentation.
The focus of this article is to share the reflections of Merina Burda on building my website. Merina is the other half of the ‘we’ I have referred to. She is the Creative Consultant behind Burda Consulting, with two decades of experience in graphic design and marketing. I thoroughly enjoyed the design and build experience; she notes the learning journey that I sent her on, and she also challenged and supported me to improve how I communicate my value and services.
Our partnership brought together different expertise and perspectives. We questioned each other’s assumptions and found solutions neither of us would have arrived at alone. It is a small, practical example of what I seek to enable in teams: ways of working that turn individual difference into collective capability.
And now, over to Merina.
What were your key learnings in building this neuro-inclusive website?
I was reminded to keep things simple.
I consider my design style very clean and minimalist, but I still had to remind myself multiple times during this build that things shouldn’t overlap, don’t put words over photos, and many other little instances.
I love how it turned out and it makes me consider that sometimes as designers we get excited about new functions and capabilities but we can’t let those things distract us from the core of the function and design.
Everyone always talks about making things “user-friendly” but I think we need to step back and ask ourselves what that really means to the broader population and make sure everyone is being included.
How did you find the website design and build experience?
I really loved the experience and working with Lisa made one of my favorite parts even better. I love doing research before writing the site map and designing the wireframe, and she sent me a variety of articles and facts which sent me on a learning journey that I greatly enjoyed.
That’s not to say there weren’t moments when I would forget one of the recommendations and then have to redesign something. But reworking things comes with learning, and now those pieces that have been reworked are honestly some of my favorites.
I also discovered that many of the things I prefer and enjoy when I visit websites actually fall under neuro-inclusive practices. I’ve always avoided auto-play videos, sounds, and too much movement, but I never really thought about why. Now looking back, it’s because, as Lisa always says, making improvements based on neuro-inclusive practices actually bring benefits to everyone.
I’ve studied UX (user experience) design practices and that’s all about how individuals interact and navigate anything from a website to a product. I think designing with neuro-inclusivity in mind will only benefit the overall user experience and will therefore decrease the bounce rate and increase the conversion rate for the business.
What will you do differently in your next web design project?
I will definitely talk to my clients about site animation and whether that’s really a good fit for their audience. Learning that even the most subtle movement can be distracting or make a website harder to navigate made me reconsider how I build websites.
Most building platforms, like Squarespace, have subtle animations and movement automatically built into each section to the point that you need to continually turn them off manually while building.
I have a lot of clients who want more animations or sounds or auto-play on their videos but now we can talk about what is enhancing their website and how we can minimize those things to become more inclusive.
What would you advise people to do differently when they are designing?
Use fewer animations and movement on your website.
Consider a more neutral color palette instead of bright, bold colors.
Be direct and stay on point with your messaging.
What I take from this work now
This work illustrates a principle at the heart of my business: neuro-inspired design benefits everyone by making the environment more supportive of different ways of thinking, processing, and contributing. Experiences that make barriers particularly visible for some people can show us how to improve the system for the whole group.
The question that guided our work remains central to my approach: how can we use what we learn from different people’s experiences to design conditions that help everyone engage and contribute more effectively?
I apply that question to team and leadership systems too. How information is shared, how meetings work, and how decisions are made all influence whether different people can contribute their expertise and connect it with others’. Improving those conditions is part of building collective capability.
➡️ Explore how I approach neuro-inspired team and leadership design.
