The Superpower I Didn't Choose

A designer opens a mockup with a modal in it, and before they can walk me through the flow, I've already lost the thread. Not because the mockup is bad. Because a modal just covered the thing I was looking at, and now I have to hold two states in my head at once: what I was doing, and what just popped up over it. By the time it closes, I've forgotten my own question.

That's not a design opinion. That's how my brain works. I have ADHD. Split attention costs me more than it costs most people, and hidden state -- anything I can't see right now -- tends to disappear. For a long time I treated that as something to manage around: more notes, more reminders, more willpower spent holding onto things that shouldn't have needed holding onto in the first place.

The gap I finally saw wasn't in my brain. It was in the tools. Every product team I'd ever worked with treated "accessible" and "low cognitive load" as a compliance checklist -- something you audit after the real design is done, for a hypothetical user who isn't in the room. Nobody was designing from the actual cost of losing your place, because nobody writing the rules paid that cost personally. That was the opportunity: stop treating my ADHD as a personal workaround problem and start treating it as the sharpest, most honest design constraint available to me. If a pattern breaks my flow, it will break someone else's flow too -- they just won't tell you, because they don't have a name for what went wrong. I do.

So I wrote it down as a rule, not a preference. No hidden actionable state. No modal popups for normal flow -- expand in place, or slide in from the edge, so the thing I was looking at never disappears. Every side panel remembers the width I left it at. Every value I might have to type by hand gets checked for the letter-pairs a dyslexic reader swaps, because I have dyslexia too, and a mistyped credential is not a UX nuance, it's a locked door. And the system has to remember state for me -- what I was doing, what changed since I last looked -- because I will not reliably remember it myself, and pretending otherwise just relocates the failure to a worse time.

Here's the concept underneath all of that: design for the user who cannot afford to lose their place, and you end up building something that works better for everyone, including the user who could have tolerated the loss. A one-click path to context isn't an ADHD accommodation, it's just a shorter path. A system that remembers so you don't have to isn't a disability feature, it's less friction for every returning user. Accessibility done honestly isn't a tax on the design -- it's a forcing function that catches the same laziness that would have annoyed everyone eventually, it just catches it sooner because someone in the room feels it immediately instead of eventually.

Without that constraint, the failure is quiet. Nobody files a bug for "I lost my train of thought." Nobody escalates "I had to retype a sixteen-character code and got it wrong twice." Those costs just show up later as churn, support load, or a user who quietly stops trying -- and by then nobody can trace it back to the modal, or the unlabeled field, or the state that vanished on refresh. Silent attrition in front of a real user is a worse outcome than a loud failure, because nobody learns from it.

The easier path was to treat this as a personal accommodation -- ship the generic pattern, keep a private list of workarounds for myself, move on. I didn't take it. I wrote the constraint as a binding rule that applies to every tool I use as an end user, checked it against real specs before they shipped, and carried the same principle -- external, durable memory instead of asking a person (or an AI agent) to hold everything in their head -- into a separate piece of software I built and released publicly, so the idea would have to hold up outside my own head too. The tradeoff I accepted: slower design reviews, because "would I lose my place here?" is a real question you have to sit with, not a box you check.

If you run a product team, the question worth stealing isn't "is this accessible." It's narrower and more useful: whose actual, personally-felt cost is currently absent from this design review? Find that person, or be honest that you're designing from theory. My ADHD isn't a caveat on my engineering judgment. It's the reason the judgment is sharper than it would otherwise be.

Evidence: a binding internal design-constraint rule authored and dated by the operator, applied against three shipped design specs, and a public open-source memory/orchestration project shipped under the same principle -- owner-attested personal claim, corroborated internal rule and repository evidence -- full record: docs/resume-hub/proof-pages/adhd-first-design-and-jitneuro.md.