The $1.9 Trillion Market That UX Designs Turn Away: The Neurodivergent User Shows You Where Things Break

When Apple launched Assistive Access in 2023, Tim Cook said something that should be obvious to anyone building digital products but somehow still isn’t: the best technology is technology that we build for everyone. Apple didn’t bolt accommodations onto an existing user interface. They rebuilt the experience from the ground up, stripping apps down to their essential functions and designing for how people actually process information. What they launched was cleaner, faster, and easier for everyone, not just users with disabilities. This wasn’t a happy accident. It is what happens when you design for the hardest user in the room.

Most companies design for efficiency. They do not design for how people actually move through the world. The neurodivergent user makes that gap and the upside of closing it impossible to ignore.

Neurodivergent users, including people with autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dyslexia, and Tourette syndrome, make up roughly 15 to 20 percent of the global population—in the United States, about 60 million neurodivergent users. The Return on Disability Group puts the broader disability market at 1.85 billion people worldwide, with an estimated $1.9 trillion in annual disposable income. Thus, the spending power behind accessible design is enormous.

This market is larger than China, but most companies are walking right past it. They are not doing this on purpose. They are doing it on the quiet assumption that the design they already have serves everyone well enough. But it doesn’t. The neurodivergent user provides the clearest signal of exactly where our designs break.

Sensory Overload: What Makes People Bail

Neurodivergence is not a single condition but describes how differences in some people’s brains change how they take in information, move through environments, and react to stimuli. On the Web or in the world, neurodivergence looks like this: someone lands on your Web site or walks into your store and the lights, the noise, the popups, the autoplay videos, and a wall of dense navigation all stack up until user engagement tips into overwhelm. When that happens, users do not push through. They leave.

The obvious fix is minimalism. Strip everything back and kill the clutter. While this instinct is right, the execution usually is not. When done carelessly, minimalism just swaps one problem for another. For a neurodivergent user, the bare-bones version of a design can be every bit as disorienting as the overloaded one.

A Better Solution

The Professional and the Personal

I come at the problem of designing for neurodivergent users from two directions. I am not going to pretend that these perspectives come apart cleanly.

My son is seven. He is bright, endlessly curious, creative, and his mind simply works in its own ways rather than the ways most user interfaces expect. Watching him use a tablet has taught me more about experience design than most of what I’ve read. A seven-year-old is the most honest usability-test subject there is. He has not yet learned what adults have learned, which is to push through friction out of habit or politeness. When something works for him, I can see it instantly. When it doesn’t, he doesn’t persist and he doesn’t blame himself, he just disengages and moves on.

So I get a ground-level view of what bad design costs, not in metrics but in real terms. I’ve watched a site lose him because the navigation gave him nothing to hold onto. I’ve watched an app treat one moment of his attention’s drifting as a failure and dump him back at the start, then watched him decide, fairly, that using the site wasn’t worth the effort. He is a user your analytics team would most likely file under high bounce rate and never think about again.

What I have seen in him and confirmed over and over in my work is that the user experiences that work for him also work better for nearly everyone. Fewer steps. Clear signals of progress. Navigation that stays put. Room to move nonlinearly without the user interface punishing him for it. None of this is about accommodation. That is just what a well-designed experience does. The way my son’s mind works does not expose some narrow edge case. It surfaces the design debt that every organization is already carrying.

If more leaders looked at this problem from that perspective, not as a compliance exercise but as a direct read on where their experience is failing the people who need it most, the quality of what their organizations build would jump. So would the business results riding on their user experience.

Designing for the neurodivergent user is the toughest design test a company faces. The constraints are tighter, the ways to fail are more varied, and the feedback is less forgiving. But the benefits of passing this test compound. Fix the navigation for a restless seven-year-old and you’ve fixed it for the executive who is skimming your site between meetings. Simplify a form for someone with dyslexia and you’ve simplified it for every first-time user who doesn’t yet know your terminology. Design for the person who can’t tolerate sensory overload and you’ve built something better for the customer who is stressed, rushed, and already out of patience. In 2026, this is most of your customers, most of the time.

Apple has understood this. The neurodivergent community is not a design edge case. It is a signal that can guide you to the right way forward. Follow it, and you will build something better for everyone.

This article originally appeared in UX Matters.