So I recently watched this YouTube short from How to ADHD, (amazing channel for adults living with any of the multiple types of ADHD btw).
And I came to a realization: Bitcoin is not ADHD friendly, and it will never be but the products made around it might be.
So I came here to ask you all, what are you guys doing for your neurodivergent users? Do you even recognize them as part of your user base? How accesible do you think your product is for people who make careless mistakes?
I've had my fair share of moments where my experience with a product has become terrible just because of things I can' totally control like inattention to detail and careless mistakes from my side and not being able to fix them later down the road, or times where my brains urges me to do something with a Lightning Channel that then I have to pay the tax for it by reversing the action (let say, closing a channel and then having to re-open it, resulting in me paying more fees just because I went full impulsive and couldn't control the urge to do it). Even here in stacker news I've found these kind of problem for myself after I post something and don't realize I've made a mistake until much later when I can't fix it anymore.
Here are some resources on how to make things ADHD friendly: App design for people with ADHD | GoTDAH Designing an ADD or ADHD-Friendly Bedroom Building Apps for a Neurodiverse Audience ADHD Friendly Rubric And this one could look like a long shot: Gnome's Human Interface Guidelines, since Gnome Apps are designed with accessibility in mind.
I would like to hear what you guys have to say, have you ever thought of this?
If you feel there is a gap in the market, you should go for it and build a solution for those users, bitcoin is permissionless, so do your own thing and see if the market responds to your idea
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I'm not a developer or a designer, starting a discussion about a topic does not mean that I have to make anything other than starting this discussion. Devs and designers can either take or not this into account, I just wanted to know if they already do or not.
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looks like neurodivergents will get selectively bred out of the future
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After the survival of the fittest plays out, only the greatest of virtue signallers will stand, and those few will create a perfectly homogeneous society where only the people with the most righteous ways of doing things and thinking will exist.
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Thats rightt. natural selection. Good obseravation
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zaps are pretty user friendly.
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Yes, they are amazing.
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Nothing yet in my circles, but we should look into that. We have a page on accessibility in the Bitcoin Design Guide, organized an initiative for Global Accessibility Awareness Day this year in May, and are trying to help wallets improve accessibility (example). We should look into ADHD as well (I'll post this thread in the accessibility channel in our Discord). It's a very slow effort because it is very hard to get people to actually work on this stuff. But I am hopeful that we can make bitcoin a first class citizen for people with all kinds of needs over time so everyone can take part in this new financial system. Thanks for posting.
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Thank to you for your work. I'll add myself to the discord, I really want to be part of these kinds of discussions.
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Adding to this, I want to ask, are adding easys way to do CPFP and RBF transactions to either bump the fees or return a wrongly done transaction before it gets inside a valid block (nobody uses 0 conf now) part of these usability guides? Even using unconfirmed UTXOs should be a thing if you ask me (I'm talking about UTXOs you already own, not incoming unconfirmed funds), in the end the first TX to confirm will cancel the other one, so you'll have to pay the carelessness tax anyways.
If not, may I ask why not? Has that not been taken into consideration before as accessibility features, or are there more reasons to that?
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We briefly mention those in the Sending bitcoin page, but not in the context of accessibility. Users have options to "Speed up" and "Cancel" transactions. Certainly something that could be mentioned in the accessibility context (but also just generally helpful in case someone accidentally hits the send button too early). Why not mentioned in the accessibility context so far? No one has brought it up or thought of it yet. Thanks for doing that.
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Wow, the title for this is really going to bother you once you realize.
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I don't think we have consciously considered ADHD before when thinking about our UI/UX.
I think our decisions so far were just generic UI/UX stuff like:
  • keep enough margin between clickable things
  • don't overwhelm the user
  • assume nothing is obvious for the user - always strife for maximum obvious
  • ... ?
Most likely, these decisions also make it easier for ADHD people - or at least not make it worse. Kind of like a reverse curb cut effect)?
(Just learned that effect from a YT comment in the short you linked, lol)
Even here in stacker news I've found these kind of problem for myself after I post something and don't realize I've made a mistake until much later when I can't fix it anymore.
Do you remember what exactly was your mistake? Just typos or something more? Concrete examples help us a lot to identify issues.
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A good example of me fucking it up a little just because I didn't pay attention to detail is this post: I'm running an experimento on LN I call "smallnode", care to join?
I was supposed to post this pentagon liquidity swap and I ended up posting the node's profile on LN+. I never fixed because I realized too late.
Many times where I responded to the wrong comment, but that has only happened on the mobile version of the site, I guess it was more of a colour scheme thing than a distractability thing, but who knows.
Many times (this is not exclusive to this site) I've quoted the wrong source by pasting the wrong link, and things of that kind.
My suggestions would be simple:
  • A high contrast mode and/or a line indicating a comments thread o separating on from another.
  • A fancier text editor, at least small icons that simply paste the syntax form something would be great.
  • More time to edit posts after submitting, or at least the opportunity to pay 1 or 10 sats to do so (I'm ok with paying the ADHD tax, I've done it my whole life and I keep doing it).
  • Maybe frequent usability polls or an user suggestion box somewhere in the website.
Other than that, I don't have more ideas, but I'm sure some people would have better ideas than me.
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Those are already great ideas!
I already thought about this myself:
More time to edit posts after submitting, or at least the opportunity to pay 1 or 10 sats to do so (I'm ok with paying the ADHD tax, I've done it my whole life and I keep doing it).
We could allow infinite edits (but with a fee) but also show the diff to the previous content so you can't just completely rewrite your comment without any trail.
I think it would also be nice if you can comment why you edited your post/comment. I've seen this on other forums where people edit something and then there is the remark "fixed typos" and such.
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That's a great idea. Many forums (looking at you Reddit) only show a small "edited" tag on top of the comment, but they don't show the history of it, also users have to write why they edited the comment manually only so they don't lose credibility when it comes to serious argumentations.
About the markdown editor, I would suggest copying the way MD editors such as QOwnNotes, ghostwrite, Standard Notes, Iotas show the text in the main editor, the MD syntax takes a second place so you can see graphically what you're doing and the result without having to compare between two windows or two tabs
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Quote to make an autist cool again :
Autist + License to kill = ( equals ) Bitoin maxi
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Not much. Bitcoin is hard enough for non-ADHD people.
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Oh yeah, this is obvious, Bitcoin is not easy for anyone, but I thing more things could be done for people with ADHD and ASD, Universal Design benefits everyone, not only neurodivergent people.
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Iam ASD with PDA misnomer. Bitcoin is platform that i rely for justice. Great future coming for ASD
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I suggest bounty so bitcoiners or regular plebs that have ASD (spectrum of autism / ADHD) can show their skin in the game for the usefullness of such app
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That's not a bad idea. I'm sure if there were bounties in place for such things (improving existing apps more than creating a new one), they would find some traction, since designing for people like us improves the experience for everyone else.
Implementing Universal Design should be a given, but it's not in most places.
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Like your Idea. Its perfect. To add to your Idea, depends how ambicious they are, it can be build on nostr for socialgraph (universal data) and UX for variation of the spectrum. Zapping its incentives for data contribution and prism for sharing cut of the zaps with platform to keep it running smooth
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This could be a self sustained economy in benefit of ASD'ers
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That would depend on the kind of product, but it's a fact that prisms could reduce the tax of dividing payments (or shares) for many users.
Send to one address, it divides itself to the respective receiver, no need to calculate individually.
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Not wel versed in prims - lightining yet
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