How might Barclays serve 7.2 million neurodiverse customers when its own communication is the barrier?

Neurodiversity is a spectrum rather than a single condition, so the first job was to learn its range before assuming anything about it. Books, medical journal studies, a PESTLE analysis and competitor landscaping gave us two things: the breadth of need a proposition would have to cover, and the white space in the market where Barclays had room to move.

Barclays' design leadership set out what the bank wanted to be known for, and its VP of External Regulatory Engagement set out the legislation now shaping inclusive customer experience. Between them they drew the boundary the work had to sit inside, so the direction we took was aligned and compliant from the start.

We ran sessions with 15 neurodiverse people so that the pain points came to us first-hand rather than through the literature. Their accounts became personas and empathy maps, which is what kept every later decision anchored to a person and a moment rather than to a diagnosis.

We formed a panel of six experts across neurodiversity and inclusive design, and used it to test the direction rather than the artefacts. Their job was to catch where a well-meant design would be read differently by the people it was for, which is the difference between being inclusive and looking it.

We opened speculatively. What-If scenarios and Futures Wheel exercises pushed each idea out through its second and third order consequences, which asks what inclusive banking could become rather than what could ship next. Working back from those futures is what surfaced the immediate moves.

We ran Crazy Eights, SCAMPER and 10x10 against three targets taken straight from the barriers: reduce the sensory load, improve how information is processed, and improve the score itself. Volume was the point at this stage, and the concepts ran from a story box to a voice assistant, so the direction could be chosen from a spread rather than defended from the first idea.

We took the concepts back to the neurodiverse panel and the experts, who endorsed the focus and then corrected the detail. Two preferences came back consistently: familiar voice tones, and colour always paired with a sign rather than carrying meaning on its own, which is WCAG 1.4.1 applied to a language rather than to a screen. The same sessions settled the product question: what was needed was proactive credit score management.

Two propositions came out of the prototyping, and both were validated afterwards. The first is a design language built on semiotics, so that meaning is carried by signs a person already recognises rather than by financial vocabulary they have to hold in memory. That is recognition over recall, applied across a bank's communication.

The second is Nurominder, the credit score tool that speaks it. It sends a timely prompt and carries the reason for it alongside, so the knowledge arrives at the moment it can be used rather than separately from it.

We presented to Barclays' senior stakeholders with a route in rather than a concept alone: how the design language folds into the existing Barclays guidelines rather than sitting beside them, and what building Nurominder would take, either in-house or as a start-up in partnership with the bank. Business plans for rollout came with it.