Interactive tool simulates cognitive diversity effects in interface design
NeuroDivSim: An Interactive Tool for Model-Based Reflection on Cognitive Diversity in Interface Design
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Designing interfaces that work well for people with different cognitive abilities can be hard. The authors created NeuroDivSim, a tool that builds detailed models of tasks and environments from design scenarios. It lets designers change assumptions about users’ cognitive traits and see how those changes affect interactions and suggestions for design improvements. This helps designers better understand and reflect on cognitive diversity during the design process.
What this means in practice
- •For user experience teams: Test different cognitive profiles on interface prototypes to improve accessibility and usability before user testing.
- •For educational software developers: Adjust learning software interfaces by simulating diverse cognitive needs to enhance user engagement and effectiveness.
Authors
Eske Beckefeld, Henrik H. J. Detjen
Abstract
Recent approaches to simulated and synthetic users offer new ways to support design, but raise questions about how computational representations of users should contribute to design practice. We present NeuroDivSim, an interactive tool that explores simulation as an inspectable mechanism for reflecting on cognitive diversity during design and prototyping. Rather than using an LLM to act as a simulated user, NeuroDivSim uses generative AI to construct inspectable task, interface, and environment models from a usage scenario. After human review, these models are combined with explicit cognitive reference configurations and processed through deterministic simulation. This enables designers to hold a modeled usage situation constant while varying cognitive assumptions and tracing their consequences to interaction steps and rule-based design recommendations. We further report an exploratory pilot evaluation (N=10) that provided formative insights into how participants engaged with the workflow and informed subsequent refinements to the presentation of models, simulation results, and recommendations.