#About the episode
Learn about Geri Reid's personal experience with dyscalculia and maths anxiety, as well as her professional work in accessibility and design systems.
We discuss the challenges people with dyscalculia face when using digital services, deceptive design patterns (like hidden fees, sneaky upsells, and countdown timers) that can exploit those challenges, and design patterns that can help make numbers more accessible.
We also talk about how internal tools and documentation are often overlooked for accessibility but are vital for employees who struggle with numbers.
#Episode links
#Timestamps
01:10 (1 minute and 10 seconds)
Lived experience with dyscalculia
Geri shares her experiences with dyscalculia, including the anxiety and challenges she faces with numbers in daily life.
03:34 (3 minutes and 34 seconds)
Challenges with design components
How design components, especially those involving numbers, can be challenging for people with dyscalculia.
08:29 (8 minutes and 29 seconds)
Financial transactions and vulnerabilities
Financial transactions, the stress of handling money, and the vulnerabilities faced by people with dyscalculia in financialcontexts.
13:18 (13 minutes and 18 seconds)
Designing for accessibility in financial services
Geri talks about her work with Lloyd's Banking Group and the importance of designing accessible financial services.
20:41 (20 minutes and 41 seconds)
Internal documentation and accessibility
Making internal documentation and systems accessible.
29:00 (29 minutes)
Deceptive design patterns
Deceptive design patterns that exploit users, particularly those with dyscalculia, and personal experiences of being misled by patterns.
38:53 (38 minutes and 53 seconds)
Helpful design patterns and tools
Design patterns and tools that are helpful for people with dyscalculia, such as auto-populating fields and account verification features in banking apps.
44:37 (44 minutes and 37 seconds)
Improving accessibility in design systems
Geri's advice on how designers can consider accessibility from the start, including learning from disabled users and involving them in the design process.
#About Geri Reid
Geri is a design systems consultant from London. As design and accessibility lead on design systems at News UK and Lloyds Banking Group, she helped some of the UK’s largest media and banking brands to design at scale. She is currently Lead Accessibility Specialist at Just Eat Takeaway. Geri is a keen accessibility advocate, amateur writer and documentation nerd.
#AI generated transcript
I’ve used AI to transcribe this episode. I’d love to pay a human to transcribe all my episodes but I can only pay for guests and editing currently.
You can sponsor a podcast episode or series. Email me at hello@lauraparker.design.
Laura (00:00):
Hello and welcome to the Accessible Numbers Podcast, a show about designing services for people with Dyscalculia and maths anxiety. I'm your host Laura, and I'm a content designer with lived experience.
Today I'm speaking to Geri Reid. Geri is a design systems and accessibility consultant from London. She's currently the lead accessibility specialist at Just Eat Takeaway. (Now I forgot to ask if she gets free food, Geri, I hope you do.)
Geri is also a writer and documentation nerd. In this episode we talk about Geri's lived experience of dyscalculia, deceptive design patterns and how to avoid them, design patterns that help us to understand numbers and how to consider people who struggle with numbers from the start.
I loved chatting with Geri, she's Ace. For more on how to present numbers clearly visit accessiblenumbers.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn or Bluesky by searching accessible numbers. I hope you enjoy the episode.
How do numbers make you feel?
Geri (01:10):
Scared, anxious, stupid. I want to run away. As soon as anyone mentions maths, I start looking for the escape route to exit the situation.
Laura (01:23):
Wow. Yeah, I totally relate to all those things. I love how you said I want to run away. That's a really great way, a great expression. So you do a lot of working accessibility design systems. Can you just tell our listeners very quickly what does that mean exactly?
Geri (01:41):
Sure. So in terms of design systems, if you're new to that, a design system is a collection of reusable components and standards that help ensure consistency of a digital product across different channels. The idea is that you build it once and you reuse it everywhere. Starting with foundations like colour and type up to whole screens and patterns in terms of accessibility. If your building blocks meet technical accessibility standards and they're supported by guidance, it helps product teams get off to the best possible start.
Laura (02:17):
And in your day-to-day life using services, do you find that any design components on patterns trip you up?
Geri (02:26):
Yeah, as someone who struggles with numbers, a lot of these things trip me up. For a bit of context, I'm someone who has struggled with maths from the get go. As a kid I was high achieving in humanities, but regularly bottom of the class for maths and that's kind of followed me all the way through life and yeah, always find a lot of workarounds for these things. Obviously as someone who designs products and services for people, I'm kind of acutely aware of the areas where people struggle and how we need to try harder to design good services for people with low numeracy, dyscalculia and maths anxiety. In terms of components which trip me up, I will regularly transpose numbers, so entering in long strings of numbers really stresses me out. If I have to type in a card or an account number, I'll get the numbers around the wrong way and I will check like 10 times and then it will still be wrong. I can see you nodding there.
Laura (03:34):
Yeah,
Geri (03:35):
Absolutely. You have a similar experience.
Laura (03:37):
That's right, that's right. And I think with the credit card and debit card details things, so I have the same experience, so I'll put the numbers in the wrong boxes, but obviously this is very confidential data and depending on where you are, there could be people looking at your screen or whatever. So I'm very conscious about where I put the numbers in what boxes and what I generally do is I tend to mirror the information, so I'll my, if I'm using my phone for example, I bring my card out and I guess put them side by side and then look, so if the form field for the card details is in the right order, that's really helpful. Sometimes it's not. So that's when, for example, my card, I think my name is at the bottom of the card, but sometimes on forms it's the first field.
(04:30):
So yeah, this kind of, it's a bit distracting when you're trying to really concentrate and copy numbers. There are some really cool components in my banking app which allow me to copy the numbers. So if I am using a phone, I can go into my app and I can actually copy and paste the number. That's been a really lifesaver for me. I regularly make monetary errors, underpaying, overpaying, not paying. So I feel like those copy and paste components but are really useful. But not everybody has a mobile banking application. Not everybody has a mobile phone with wifi or internet access. So if people are actually manually inputting their card numbers, these mistakes are still kind of there. I guess.
Geri (05:21):
Yeah, I find if I'm doing a large financial transaction or say booking travel, something with lots of complicated time zones, I will always get someone else to check it if I can. I feel like there's so much pressure, especially if you have to transfer thousands of pounds in a transaction and there's no one else that can check it for you. That's a really stressful thing. If I'm the one that's been responsible for inputting the numbers and I don't trust myself to do that correctly.
Laura (05:49):
It's really interesting because I was talking to someone the other day about how perhaps a search engine is a kind of component. And what I mean by that is if I like you, I'm paying money and there are many zeroes at the end of that amount of money, I will copy and paste that into a search engine and say, what amount is this? Or perhaps if I've got a word document open, I will copy the number into a word doc and have word read that aloud to me. I can't really get by unless I have it read aloud. So for example, £100 and £1000, I know there's an extra zero on there, but if I'm glancing at it or I'm doing something among my busy day, it's very easy for me to make a mistake and think it's actually £100 or vice versa.
(06:41):
So I will actively, like you said, check the number or ask somebody else and it puts you in a really vulnerable position because you're kind of having to rely on people being around you to do basic stuff. A lot of people will say to me, well, why don't you use a calculator and I just cannot use a calculator. I don't understand how to use a calculator. And it sounds silly, but first of all, there are numbers involved in using a calculator and people with dyscalculia you might be the same, often have problems interpreting shapes as well and certain patterns and remembering how to multiply or divide and those two icons look the same. And so actually how I get around that is I just use a search engine or actually more recently chat GPT, and it's not always reliable, but if I can just get some information in there, it can give me some sort of information back that I can understand.
(07:42):
The people I've spoken to about this, their mind is blown. And these are just some of the many extra steps that people like us, people who struggle with numbers or have maths anxiety and dyscalculia, will go through and they're kind of hidden. This is things I do automatically I don't think of. And it's only when you say out loud now you start to realise, oh, this actually takes a lot of time. If I added up all the time ironically of how long I spent trying to get around numbers in my life, I imagine it would be years. Yeah, I totally relate to your experience. Some of the patterns and things that tripped me up are things like date pickers and time pickers as well. I dunno if you have any experience personally with those components.
Geri (08:29):
Yes, I'm nodding along with everything you are saying there. Date and time pickers, I find the 24 hour clock just unfathomable and working out times between time zones when booking flights or time is a real struggle. I'm always half an hour early to any face-to-face meeting. I always overestimate how long it will take me to get there and I have a huge anxiety around being late. I think because of that. Outside of personal screens in the wider world, I find departure boards at airports and train stations particularly difficult. There's times where I've actually had to photograph the board and send it to a friend and say, can you work out what gate I'm supposed to be at? I had one recently, it was at Gatwick South I think just a couple of weeks ago where it was a really long board and it had sort of stacked up two different flights, so some flights down the left, some down the right, and it was really wide. It was hard to connect which gate related to which flight and I just kept checking and checking and checking and second guessing myself. Do you have that as well with
Laura (09:40):
Travel boards? Yeah, yeah. This is a frequent anxiety for me to the point where actually it's kind of made my world smaller because I will struggle to read a sort of timetable. And when I used to commute, I don't do that anymore, I work from home. But when I used to commute, I got to the point where I would check with someone on the train so I would get the same train. So I trained my brain to get the same train so I didn't have to really think about looking at any other times. And then I would get on the train and I would always ask, is this the so-and-so train going to this place? And then I remember I would look at trains have these screens on them and they say where they are stopping basically, and I remember my eyes would be glued to that screen and if I saw my destination I could relax.
(10:37):
It's another hidden thing because if that train was late for any reason or cancelled, I had a really hard time because I kind of trained my brain to just go for one train and so it would put me in a panic almost to the point where I would freeze and I would just have to just stand there staring at this board or ask somebody when is the next train. And it just felt really, I don't know, uncomfortable. And I think there's a wider problem around displaying numbers in tables. So not only timetables for displaying dates and times, but also the bills. Bill statements are always in tables, any kind of financial statement, payslips, they all come in tables now. I think I'm a bit like you in which I really struggle to sort of like if I'm looking at a table, I get lost between the lines and the grids and so if I'm checking something or if I'm trying to focus in on a number, it's very difficult when that number is in a really tiny box.
(11:45):
So I think for people who create content or if their service uses a lot of tables, a really good thing to consider is to have a description of the content. I mean this doesn't quite work for big data sets and data visualisation, but for example, if you have a two by two table on your service. So you could present financial information as if it were a story.
There's an organisation called Plain Numbers that do this really well. So for example, if you received a utility bill, the way that a story format layout might look would be on the 1st of December we will take £20 from your account because you are in this payment system where you pay 20 pounds every month or something like that and it just gives you that you can read it in a story as sentences, but it also allows people who do not have a problem with numbers to easily access the data.
So we don't want to change people's experience if they have no problem with numbers by only displaying information in sentences. So I think a toggle might work quite well. So if you imagine you have some financial information, a table and you have the ability to toggle between that information and a story format, I think that would be really helpful for me personally and it would allow people to get by if they have no problem with numbers.
Geri (13:18):
Yeah, I totally agree. A big thing with me accessibility is just presenting things in different ways. The more ways you can present something, the more people will be able to get on board with it. It's like any sort of service, you come up against things where say you can only call a number and if I'm deaf, I'm not going to be able to do that potentially. Or things which are only internet based, you are excluding people that don't have access to something. If there are lots of different ways to engage with something, then it becomes more accessible to more and more people. So having some sort of toggle between two views, I think that's a fantastic idea.
Laura (13:56):
I just want to talk about some of your work that you did with Lloyd's Banking Group, if that's okay. So I read on your website that you spent about three years working on a design system for Lloyd's Banking Group and I believe that was multiple banks under the umbrella. What was it like creating components and patterns for a bank or for multiple banks?
Geri (14:19):
Lloyd's was a fantastic place to work for accessibility. I think Lloyd's banking group has something like 26 million customers, so I feel like it's the closest you get to designing for a public service while working for a corporate. While I was there, there was a really thriving accessibility guild and lots of super keen advocates who were genuinely committed to doing right by their users and they had user researchers that would visit people at home and understand their attitudes to money and see where they struggled in terms of components working for banks, it's all about forms, so you quickly become a form expert slash nerd. I think what's the most important thing to remember in a form is forms are just a means to an end. No one ever said, oh, I filled in a really rad form today. They'll say the signup process was really quick or I got a loan approved. No one has ever said the form has these cool animated placeholder labels and it scrolls horizontally. It was so fun to fill in. So I feel like any attempt to make form fields creative or pretty is just to no end. And the challenge when you have a team in a bank that wants to do something different, they want to jazz up their mortgage application or insurance process. I think that's where you run into some troubles.
Laura (15:47):
Did you experience any challenges as a person who struggles with numbers actually creating content to do with money? The reason I'm asking is I had a great chat where we discussed being a designer and neurodivergent and how sometimes depending on what it is you're designing, it could be either a trigger for you, it could be difficult for you just because of how your brain works. Did you experience anything like that when designing at Lloyd's?
Geri (16:15):
I think it's really just having empathy for people that you are designing for. I'm not sure if there was anything on a personal level with me. I'm just always trying to add my lived experience in and say, Hey, think about the people with low numeracy or dyscalculia who might struggle with this. I think one of the big blockers we would have is you would have product teams proposing like a complicated slider or a dial to do something like increase your mortgage payment or loan. And I'd always be like, why can't people just type the numbers into a box? Any sort of fiddly slider or calculator requires fine motor skills. It's typically not keyboard accessible. Also, if someone is in the position where they're applying for say an overdraft, it's possibly because they're experiencing financial difficulty and the last thing they want to do is have to think about how to input their information. So forget the aesthetics, think about the people.
Laura (17:14):
Oh, that's a really great sentiment. It's funny, I was just thinking about this concept of financial exclusion, which really means excluding people based on how they prefer to pay or use services to do with money. I remember growing up and my parents used to withdraw all the money from the bank account and they would only sort of deal in cash, so they would get paid, they would go to the bank, get everything out, and then they would use the money to budget. And obviously this was before banking apps, probably before the internet, but they still do that to this day. And there are a lot of people like that who for whatever reason, it's comfortable for them to actually have the cash in their hand. And from a dyscalculic perspective, it can also be useful to count that money as well. So dealing with monetary values online might be tricky, but having something physical to count perhaps might not be.
(18:13):
So we have to understand that although I think you would say probably many people would use an online banking service or something like an app. There are still people who are paying with cash. And it's really interesting because we'll get onto some deceptive design patterns in a second, but there's a brilliant charity called Fair by Design and they concentrate on what they call the poverty premium, which is how much somebody who lives in poverty would pay extra for services that we just need every day, like insurance utility bills. And there are some reasons for that. It could be that it's because of where they live. So if they live in an area that's low income area perhaps and they want to buy car insurance, there's stats that suggest that car insurance is more expensive in those areas. And for example, if you want to access a cash machine to get your money out, cash machines that charge are more popular in low income areas.
(19:16):
So it's really interesting and really key that people who are making financial products and services, they appreciate that. Whereas somebody might be aware of financial services online, they may choose not to do that for several reasons.
Now, do you think that when you are designing design systems, obviously there are a hell of a lot of components to do with numbers or have a number entry field or tables, etc. Do you think that numbers are forgotten about almost in design systems? I very rarely see guidelines and advice on how to present numbers clearly in design systems and if it is, it's generally in the anatomy section as opposed to being a standalone section. What do you think?
Geri (20:05):
Yeah, I don't think numbers are forgotten about. They're just not as high priority as they should be. Thinking back to the design systems I've worked on, we'd have a big focus from our content designers on plain language, but unless you've got someone like me with an actual impairment on the team, then numbers do get very little visibility in component docs. Even in a bank, it's curious really because low numeracy affects half of the adults in the UK and so much of the web is transactional and based around money, it's always intriguing that we don't put more effort into it.
Laura (20:41):
What a great point to make there and I think, dunno if you get this, but when you talk to people about your lived experience, oftentimes people will say, I relate to that. That's how I feel about numbers, that's how numbers make me feel. Or somebody in my family is dyscalculic or has maths anxiety. So you tend to find a lot of people themselves or know somebody and that is like you said, because about half of people in the UK will struggle with numbers at some point and it's important to realise that you could be a whiz at numbers, a scientist, you could be a surgeon or whoever, but also at certain parts of your life, anxiety and stress can impact how you interpret information including numbers. So if you are experiencing a trauma, if you are just having a bad day, that's going to impact how you use an online service.
(21:36):
So I think sometimes we tend to think of people using our services as having the best day ever. Nothing's happening to them, they're just coming on and they're making a payment, they're paying a bill and everything in their life is fine. But like you said, if somebody is applying for an overdraft or for a loan, there might be some reasoning behind that that's quite emotional, a motive.
So what we can do as designers is just be super, super clear with our numbers, present them plainly and clearly just like you said, just like we do with plain English Now with design systems, well design systems come hand in hand with documentation, technical documents and things like that. For anyone who hasn't sort of been through technical documentation before, I have found in my experience, they're very wide ranging in how accessible they actually are. So some technical documents are designed with accessibility in mind, very usable, some documentation, very technical, very jargon heavy, very overloaded with information. Do you think there's a way, or perhaps how can designers who are working on design systems or perhaps just people generally make their documentation more accessible for people with dyscalculia, but maybe just generally
Geri (22:52):
As an accessibility lead? Something I'm always reiterating is accessibility is just as important for colleagues as it is for customers. I feel like colleagues are often forgotten, so not as much effort goes into things like internal docs. Getting feedback from the users of your documentation and presenting it in a way they understand is really important for me and technical docs, I guess I think about two things. First is what is the purpose of the documentation? I often defer to, there's a website called Dear Taxis, it's like a systemic approach to authoring technical docs and it identifies four distinct needs and four corresponding forms of documentation. They are how to guides, tutorials, technical reference and explanation. And I feel like thinking about the purpose helps you to establish the level of detail that's required. A second thing is what do your users actually want? If the docs are for engineers, talk to the engineers and see what will be helpful to them and how they would like things presented. It's going to be very different to the content that product people want to see. For some people, as you said, text might be the most useful for other groups, they might want it presented in a table and as you said, you might want to offer documentation in different ways to suit different people.
Laura (24:20):
It's funny you should mention internal documentation because there's a real difference between external and internal services. When it comes to usability, accessibility, I'm thinking right now of intranets or in my experience it's been time sheets, timekeeping within an internal system. So I remember once I worked for an agency, I won't name them and we had to charge our client for the time we worked on their work. And so for example, you worked for eight hours a day, so you were expected to bill for eight hours a day, but obviously in that time we go to the toilet, we make a cup of tea, we have our lunch, so they actually had, within the timekeeping system, there was an option for a tea and pee task. So we were expected to document every time you went to the toilet and made a cup of tea. At the time I was very young, it was one of my first jobs after university and I was happy to be paid and now I think back to it and I just think, wow, that's not good. That's not okay. It is just one of those things that comes back to you sometimes randomly you think, wow, what were they thinking?
Geri (25:42):
Surely that's a basic human right. Tea and pee has got to be. I've been in similar situations working for large investment banks. Well they used to expect you to time sheet yourself working in digital and we had something ridiculous at one bank was at, it was something like 14 minute or 17 minute increments or something, which didn't work for me, even if it was in hours, I'd struggle with it, let alone some sort of non divisible increment that I don't understand. Anyway, so that used to really stress me out. I don't think there's any way around that other than eight hours a day. Fine, I'm happy to put that on something or maybe chunk it down into two half days, but trying to do something in minute increments is just terrifying for me.
Laura (26:34):
Yeah, the reason, well the tea and pee thing is something worth saying, but the reason I brought it up was because I would routinely bill a client for more hours than I'd worked because of the way, because the time sheet system was so unusable. It was a US technology so that you know how in the us the month is first and then the day. So it was all I would get called into the office, why have you spent 800 hours on this, this, that? I was like, oh no, no, eight hours, eight hours, not 800 or why did you work a weekend? And I just remember, oh, so what I had to do was I basically had a paper version that I drew out a table and I just kept it on paper and then I actually asked a colleague to sit with me and put it in.
(27:33):
And sometimes online internal systems are very important, especially when it comes to pay. So I dunno about you, but I cannot understand the payslip. And I remember when I used to log on to certain intranets to get my payslip or to find out why it was wrong or if there was a problem. That whole journey was super stressful and then anxiety provoking. In fact, for a long time I just didn't open my payslips whatsoever. I didn't look at them, I just prayed that they were fine. I think now with banks and banking online and through apps, it's a little bit easier, but I definitely think there's room to make those really important vital in financial information accessible.
Geri (28:21):
I also think as a company you have a real responsibility with procurement to procure tools which are accessibility tested. It's an interesting one. As an accessibility specialist, I will produce a V patch, which is a form which shows your technical compliance when people are engaging with the company I work for, but it never really seems to happen the other way. Surely big companies like Salesforce or Workday or all these companies that are big providers to industry, they must go through a reverse process with companies and yet so many internal tools are so difficult to use and I find that slightly unfathomable.
Laura (29:00):
That's right, and it goes back to what you said a few moments ago about internal staff and how internal staff are also disabled people, neurodivergent people, people having a bad day. And I think so much of the chat is around the external experience. We need to pull that back in. Speaking of some sort of bad awful patterns.
So I want to just start this section by saying that people with dyscalculia maths anxiety are more vulnerable to things like deceptive design patterns, particularly to do with numbers and money, pricing, scams, debt, all these things. When I was younger, I had so much debt partly because of ignorance, partly because I didn't understand what I was actually doing and I didn't realise what an APR was, I probably still don't really understand it and what interest really means. I made some really bad mistakes when I was younger around that, especially those payday lenders.
(30:07):
So I am very acutely aware that some organisations use these deceptive patterns to try and trick people into buying more, spending more, taking on debt, etc. Some examples that came to mind is things like hidden fees and hidden costs within a journey. So for example, say you are purchasing, I'm going to use insurance because for me, this is a really tricky thing for me to do. You kind of get to the basket, you've bought your insurance, you've spent hours in my case going through the form trying to figure it out and then they add on extras within the basket or you are expecting the price to be something and it turns out to be a £100 more expensive and it's not always easy to understand why things like sneaking items into baskets. I think the beauty industry is really, really bad for this.
(31:02):
So for example, I wanted to buy a mascara. I had this experience of the day, bought a new mascara online, got in there and the basket was kind of set up. It looked like I'd actually put this stuff in my basket, but it wasn't. They were displaying it as if I had, but it was an optional thing, but the option was it was really hard to take it off or out of my basket. Now the reason I find this quite troubling is because people perhaps like you and me, we can't estimate money quantity really well or in fact I really struggle. So if there's a mistake on a receipt, if I've been overcharged for something like the mascara example, I actually got almost to put in my details in before I realised this amount doesn't seem quite right. So what should be a £10 mascara, actually was actually £25 pound. That doesn't seem right to me, but if you have a lot going on or you just go about your day, sometimes that can be really annoying and things show up sometimes in my basket in my order and I'm like, where does this come from? And it's because I'm really poor at estimating how things could cost. Is there anything or any examples that you can think of these deceptive patterns?
Geri (32:21):
I'm also bad at just estimating anything cooking with recipes. I have no point of reference of how many mills things are. I regularly order things which are like this big because I have no idea. She says gesturing where no one can see very large. And in terms of action examples, the biggest sticker in my family is Amazon Prime. My teenagers have been signed up to Amazon Prime four or five times and just last month my daughter came in very upset, unknowingly signed up to an annual subscription of Amazon Prime for £95 while trying to cancel the monthly subscription that she'd unknowingly subscribed to. Now that's a lot of money when you're at uni and working part-time for minimum wage. They did refund her, but she found it quite distressing and was like that's 10 hours work for me. So it's also when you don't, because with me I have the same sort of thing where I don't really know how much things cost or how much things should cost and because I'm always quite reserved, I'm not someone that will speak up. I got charged 10 euros for a coffee when I was in Amsterdam recently, and then as I was walking away I was thinking, should that have cost 10 euros when it costs like three pounds something in London? No, they obviously charged me for two, but I kind of went over it in my mind and thought that sounds like quite a lot, but maybe the coffee's just really expensive here. Things like that.
Laura (33:52):
Yeah, I mean really great examples. And the last point you made around feeling not confident, whether you've made the error or somebody else has, that is a real maths anxiety thing and that is to do with I think feeling shame around numbers. So I feel a lot of shame for me. I didn't speak up for how old am I now for 30, 20 odd years I suppose around numbers. It was only in the last couple of years I've actually started to talk about it. And that is because actually I had some really negative experiences with people in the past around numbers and I've been shamed and bullied for that. So yeah, so I totally get it. Why would you go up to someone and say, I think you've overcharged me when it could be that I just got the numbers wrong because I'm stupid. So yeah, I totally relate to that and thanks for being super honest and I do wonder how much money organisations make maybe in that circumstance it was an honest mistake, but all these deceptive patterns, particularly in pricing and shopping, I do wonder just how much more they make by doing things like that.
Geri (35:05):
The most stressful one for me in terms of manipulative patterns is when the sort of 10 people have this in their basket or there's only one room left at this hotel and you just go into this panic of I'll miss out, I'll have nothing to eat or nowhere to stay, my basic human needs will go unmet, which is all completely ridiculous and it's all down to this kind of pattern of trying to make you to do something or coerce you to do something without giving you that space to actually think about it properly, which I'm really bad at. I'll just fine, I'll do it just to take the stress out of the situation.
Laura (35:42):
Yeah, of course. And depending on your previous life experience, for example, if you had experienced homelessness in the past or perhaps you lived in an insecure home, something like that saying, oh, there's only one room left in this place would bring up all those feelings and memories and you can understand why it works because they're tapping into the psyche and they're tapping into people's anxiety and it's just such a shame. And I would really encourage people if you can, to stop doing that and to be upfront about things like additional costs. These insurance companies, I'm sorry to go on about insurance, but it is the best example. Oftentimes if you're searching for something, they will show you maybe three or four examples with one of them highlighted, this is the best example for you. This is the cheapest one. It's not always the cheapest or best option now because I hate this stuff, I just choose it.
(36:49):
I'm like that one, just get this off my brain and I know that it's not the best for me, but the workarounds and the mental arithmetic to do the mathds or to work it out, it's just so stressful and it is just one of those things bug bears, which is like if you are a responsible company and you're doing these, please do not, please be upfront about what hidden costs there might be or just add that to the total because what you're doing is you're creating anxiety and honestly shame with within people. I'm talking about myself. I dunno if anyone else feels this, but I do not want to look at the interface because it brings up so many memories of just the stress. So I would rather just choose the option and be done with it. Yeah, so I think just a plea for me for organisations who do do this kind of stuff, to really think about the impact on people with dyscalculia mass anxiety and learning numeracy skills, but people in general,
Geri (37:55):
I think the worst ones, I think I call them sort of confirm shaming the links where they're typically on modals or pop-ups where they want you to accept something and the alternative is a link that says, no thanks, I don't like free money or no thanks, I'm happy to pay more. Which just shames you into feeling like it's that emotional manipulation that I'm doing the wrong thing.
Laura (38:20):
Yeah, it totally is. And it's the same with things. If you say no to something and then you get asked again and again and again like they're trying to wear you down, it's like, please, I've said, no, I've opted out of this. Don't bug me anymore. We've spoken a lot about these deceptive or manipulating patterns. Is there anything or any design patterns or usability patterns and things like that that help you within your day that you find quite useful?
Geri (38:53):
As you alluded to before, anything that auto-populates the numbers is really helpful. Like when an app texts you a code and then it syncs in with the app and it auto-populates every time that happens. I just love technology. Allowing me to scan the numbers of my debit card through my phone camera instead of having to populate the field manually is a huge win.
Geri (39:16):
As someone who regularly gets the numbers around the wrong way. The other one for me is also the checker that the banking apps now have to confirm that the account I'm transferring to is actually an account that's got to be the most reassuring banking feature for me, knowing there's an account in the right name makes me a lot more confident that I've entered in the account number correctly. So things that do things automatically for you that just take away that pressure of either entering numbers or the confirmation that you've got something correct.
Laura (39:48):
Absolutely.
(39:48):
I hundred percent agree with those. For me, the check your answers option, so my banking app, when I've entered a number value, it puts a page in between the payment so that I can check my answers. And so many times I've gone yet again, added an extra zero, not put enough zeros on there or it's just completely wrong. And interestingly you say about the account checker, so checking that an account is verified, so going back to when we first started talking about people withdrawing cash. So if I was to talk to a family member and say, why do you withdraw cash? They would say to me, it's safer. I don't trust online. I hear about all the scams and it's just so ironic that these mobile apps are actually more useful because of these sort of design patterns and components and things, but yet there's still a barrier to people actually adopting using them.
(40:46):
So I still feel like although it's value to me, and there are still folks who still think that it's safer to deal with actual cash. Yeah, I think that the money thing is a real stickler I think it seems like for you as well though, just money is everywhere and it's the same with time, the date. So when I talk to people, one of the first things I suggest is how are you writing the date and time? So I really struggle to tell the time I still can't do it right or I still make errors. I can't look at a clock face and confidently know what the time is. There's loads of hoops that I have to go through and inventive ways of timing things like for example, if I know how long a song is, I put the song on and that means I've got this amount of time to do things.
(41:39):
Honestly, it gets wild. I love that. So I always say to people, check how you're displaying the date and time. If for example, your time is in the 24 hour clock, you alluded to 14 and 1300 hours looks a lot like 4:00 PM and 3:00 PM. So just be aware of how numbers appear in your dates and times because those are the most important things. If there's an appointment, if you're booking something, if you're paying for something at a certain time and date, just have a look at how you're displaying. I would suggest go and look at the Go UK design system on how to present the time and date. I find that really
Geri (42:20):
Useful. I love GDS, the government digital services guidance site. I defer to that for everything and I'm totally with you on the time thing. I couldn't tell the time until I was at secondary school. Now you would've thought that would've been a bit of a red flag as I was reasonably high achieving at school, but your kid not being able to actually tell the time. One of my most enduring memories is being made to stand in front of the class and I must've been year six, so the last year of primary school and being made to cry because I couldn't tell the time. And I still really struggle with things like quarter past or quarter to. If I have to work out a certain amount of time and the starting time is quarter two, I'm just toast can't again, I'll type it into chat GPT. Now this is the time. How long will an hour and a half be after this time? And that really helps me out.
Laura (43:15):
Yeah, I do exactly the same or a search engine. Oh yes, yes, yes. Because if it compounds, so for example, if you have an appointment and you have to get a train or a bus or you have to just plan travel and then there's overlays with flights. I actually haven't booked a flight in about 10 years. I cannot do that. Train layovers. And then obviously if there's cancellations, so it does compound over time, ironically. Yeah. One of the things I want to ask you actually is specifically around slashed zeros if people are unfamiliar, a slashed zero is a number zero with a line through it, a horizontal line. Now the reason I want to bring this up with you is because it's quite contentious now because the zero and the O are very close together on a keyboard. If you've ever looked, have a look, I constantly make the error of confusing the two. So if I'm entering money, I put a letter O instead of the number zero for example. So the slash zero just helps me to distinguish between the letter and the number. And this is really helpful in reference numbers and codes where there are letters and numbers used. Alternatively, however, people find out they can look like the number eight because they have the horizontal line through it. What do you think?
Geri (44:37):
I regularly get zeros and the letter O mixed up. My car ridge has either a zero or an O in it. I have a 50 50 chance of getting it right. I can't tell you now which one it is. I can just picture the shape of it. So a zero with a slash through is helpful to me. Provided the shape, as you say, doesn't look like an eight. I think the slash needs to be on an angle so it goes through rather than across. Otherwise it could be even more confusing.
Laura (45:04):
That's right. That's right. So you a design system and accessibility consultant. How can designers consider people like us or people with dyscalculia maths anxiety or low numeracy skills? From the very start,
Geri (45:19):
When anyone asks me where to start with accessibility, my advice is always learn how disabled people use the web. That's possibly different to how you do if you don't have direct access to test with people with disabilities and impairments. Do some desk research, watch YouTube videos, read blogs and see where people struggle and how you can design better to support them then involve people in your design process. Actually when I spoke to you, it's about a year back you were talking about getting folks together with dyscalculia to test stuff. Did you get any further with that? I'm always happy to volunteer.
Laura (45:55):
Oh, that's really helpful, thank you. No, I haven't done that yet, but that's a really interesting idea. I find that because dyscalculia is very underdiagnosed and the research into dyscalculia is about 30 years behind dyslexia, for example, and the word is really ugly. It's awful to say, can't spell it. And so I think people just don't associate themselves with it. So they might know within themselves, they feel anxious about numbers or they shy away from things, but they might not outright say, I have maths anxiety or I'm dyscalculia. So it's very difficult to find people to test with and research with. So the idea was to have a collection of people who are willing to do design research for firms do the thing that I need to figure out is how to compensate people because I do not like the idea of leaning on disabled people or neurodivergent people for free to improve services.
(46:55):
I think there should be compensation so that I just need to iron that out. But yeah, it's a terrific idea. Thanks for reminding me. While you're talking about the accessibility stuff and designing and things, I came across your excellent WCAG checklist for designers. So the web content accessibility guidelines. Now you've created some cards and a list of checklist for designers, and I've found that really useful because unsurprisingly, the actual WCAG guidelines themselves are quite hard to interpret myself. And as somebody who is involved in making inclusive experiences is very vital. I understand the guidelines, it's just a shame that they're not very understandable. But you've done a great job in kind of collating the information into a list and I just wondered why you had to do that in the beginning.
Geri (47:43):
Yeah, I guess just for some context, if you're not familiar with WCAG, the web content accessibility guidelines, it's the main technical standard that the tech industry uses to measure technical accessibility. It's funny, I wrote that years ago when I was first getting to grips with WCAG. It was 2018, I think WCAG 2.1 had just been released and I was on the design system at Lloyd's and we decided we needed to get on board and make sure we were technically compliant. I read WCAG end to end, and as you say, it's just such a difficult thing to get on board with. So I rewrote the design criteria in my own words, really just for myself to understand it better. And I put it on my website so I could bookmark it and refer to it in meetings because I'm so bad at numbers. Things like colour contrast ratios and font sizes just don't stick in my head. So I keep second guessing myself and I wanted to write something in my own words to refer to so I could speak with confidence in meetings. It's ended up being the most visited page on my website.
Laura (48:51):
Well done.
Geri (48:51):
So I'm just super pleased it's been useful to other people. I recently did a training course online and it was one of the resources which really made me laugh
Laura (49:01):
Resource on somebody else's training.
Geri (49:05):
Well, they just linked out to a load of stuff. There are some really good plain English explainers of WCAG online Stark, one of the big accessibility tooling companies has one, it's called something like WCAG and plain language or something. They're really useful if I'm really second guessing something. And even with another accessibility specialist, we'll often be picking through WCAG and we'll have differing views on whether or not something is technically compliant or not. Yeah, it's a difficult one.
Laura (49:37):
Yeah. Well I found it incredibly helpful. I actually shared it with my team, my current team as well. I dunno if you ever get this, but I think you actually alluded to it just then when somebody asks you for a specific guidance or they might say to me, I get this quite often when, so I get this from messages from DMs and also at work where someone will say, oh, you are good at numbers or you do numbers, can you help with this? But actually I'm quite bad with numbers. I just talk about my experience. So often I'm presented with something that's quite complex. It could be a complex table or something like that. Quite recently I've been doing lots of work with numbers and forms, and I actually really struggle to help because I cannot read the number or it's kind of quite taxing.
(50:29):
So having something to lean on, which is like, oh, great, well, thanks for thinking of me. Yes, this is my experience and it doesn't look great from a usability perspective, but I cannot actually influence this design because I'll need more time to really get my head around it. So I just go, oh, by the way, are you aware of these guidelines and here's some things that will be helpful, and your kind of checklist has been one of the things that I've drawn on. It's been really incredible. Thank you for putting that together. I really think that lots of folks do awesome stuff for free and it's used and usable, but perhaps you don't get the thanks for that. So I just want to say thank you for doing that and for anybody else who's putting some free stuff out there, that's really helpful and you're taking your time out of your busy day to do that. Big thanks. Was there anything that we didn't quite touch upon today that you think deserves more room and people should check out?
Geri (51:26):
I would encourage anyone who's interested in supporting folks with low numeracy, dyscalculia and matha anxiety to visit your website accessiblenumbers.com. I have learned so much from it, and it's full of links to reports and studies that you can use to support your efforts if you're trying to sell something into the team, which is helpful. A couple of hugely influential authors around accessibility for me, Adam Silver for sensible form and UX advice, and Stephanie Walter, her weekly newsletters. Excellent. And her website is just my go-to for accessible design, the government digital service, as you say, my gold standard for accessible components and research. And I guess for specific information on dyscalculia or getting assessed, my starting point for getting a dyscalculia diagnosis was a site called Dyscalculia Network. It's dyscalculianetwork.com. If you can spell Dyscalculia, good luck to you. The site's got info and support and a list of educational psychologists and assessors.
Laura (52:33):
That's right. Yeah. I'm actually an adult advisor for the Dyscalculia Network.
Geri (52:38):
Amazing.
Laura (52:39):
They're doing brilliant stuff and they seem to be the only real charity who are kind of visible in this space. So yeah, I would definitely, if people are listening to us chatting and they feel some familiarity or they think they might have dyscalculia, then please have a look. They've got really good resources. I do want to say that sometimes self-diagnosis is enough, though I get this question so often, which is, do I need to get an assessment? I don't think so. What do you think?
Geri (53:10):
Well, assessments are not currently available on the NHS, although they're not according to the Dyscalculia network. I dunno firsthand if that's right. So it's something that you have to pay for yourself, and it's not cheap. If you work for a company who has private healthcare, which offers a neurodivergence pathway, an assessment might be covered by your insurance. So that's worth querying with HR. But for most people, this is a new specialism that aren't that many assessors. The demands high, and I found lots of assessors only work with kids rather than adults. So it takes a long time to find someone and to get an appointment. It's a tough one because it's not like they do. They give you a very long report based on your assessment with them. That sort of goes into detail of all the diagnostic tests and things you've done, but it's not like you get a certificate saying that have just dyscalculia or a badge.
(54:07):
I find these sort of assessments for different types of neurodivergence, kind of curious because one educational psychologist's opinion based on their experience and the tests. So yeah, I think self-assessing yourself. I knew I had dyscalculia just based on all the different areas of my life. It's not just maths, it's time, it's direction, it's coordination. Just all these things kind of add up to it. So yeah, I don't think you need to get formally assessed was just for peace of mind for me and just to be able to say, oh, okay, there is a reason I'm like this. I'm not just lazy or not engaged with maths.
Laura (54:50):
Yeah, very well, very well said. And just seems to be aware that even in assessment, it doesn't change how you feel. It can give you some, like you said, validity, but it won't really change your experience. So don't bank on it making you feel better. Fantastic. It's been awesome to chat to you today, Geri. Where can people find you if they want to get in touch with you or just read some of your great work
Geri (55:15):
In terms of where to find me? So I am part of the recent migration from Twitter to Bluesky. I'm hoping folks will stick around this time. It's feeling a lot like old Twitter that we were all desperately nostalgic for. So my handle there is my website. I'm at GeriReid.com. Just as a last word, can I say thank you so much, Laura, for all the work you do supporting accessible numbers, folks like you, raising awareness are potentially helping so many people. So keep fighting the good fight for us. Dyscalculia.
Laura (55:48):
Oh, thank you so much. It means a lot. Yeah. I just want to mention that the website accessiblenumbers.com really started with my work with Jane McFadyen and Rachel Malic on a poster that we did a few years ago. If anyone's interested, you could search for designing for people with dyscalculia and low numeracy and it should be some of the top search results.
And it's a poster, it's a design poster full of do's and don'ts for designing. And what happened was we had a lot of research left over and nowhere to put it, so I just spun up the website. So if anyone's interested, it's designing for people with dyscalculia and low numeracy poster.
Take care everyone. Bye.
If you think you might have dyscalculia or maybe you've been recently diagnosed, you can find help and advice for children and adults on the Dyscalculia Network, search dyscalculia network, or visit dyscalculia network.com if you want to work with me and make the numbers in your service accessible.
Visit Lauraparker.design. Big thanks to Steve Folland for editing and producing this podcast.