The Benefits Of Cognitive Inclusion In UX Research

In the summer of 2024, I became co-chair of a working group of expert researchers who came together to determine how best to perform accessibility testing with people with cognitive disabilities. This was work I did for Fable, where I am currently VP of Innovation. Cognitive disability is an umbrella term for several disabilities that impact how people process information, and it usually affects memory, focus, and/or learning. It is the most prevalent disability in the U.S. (13.9% via CDC ), and cognitive disability is increasing rapidly ( Yale study ). We set four goals for ourselves to learn how to work with this audience: How should we recruit and screen participants? What are best practices for research with cognitive participants? Do these methods work in a real study? Documenting what we learned so that we could share it. We created a screener to recruit people who self-identified as having challenges with memory, focus, and learning. We also reviewed published studies that involved cognitive testers to learn best practices for working with them. Next, we tested these best practices with an initial group of 25 testers in a pilot study. We fine-tuned our approach iteratively and created a guide to running user interviews with cognitive testers and a survey that could quantify their experiences using digital products. Finally, we documented what we learned . After our pilot study with this new group of testers finished, I felt that they would uncover more usability insights than the general population (gen pop) user research participants I’d worked with in the past. I set out to validate this hunch. The Cognitive Usability Study I decided to run a joint study with Fable’s partners at the University of California, Irvine, in collaboration with Syed Fatiul Huq and with help from Fable researchers Pranav Pidathala, Ali Brown, and Michael Fagan to see if my hypothesis about finding more insights with cognitive testers proved true or not. I generated three websites f