I built a client an app for energy pacing, and the most important design decision I made was dragons.
Not the tracking logic. Not the categories. Not the gentle, evidence-informed approach to noticing your own load before it it's too late. Those mattered, but they weren't the thing that made it work. The thing that made it work is that she is a late-diagnosed autistic woman whose entire world is dragons, and I knew, with total confidence, that if the app looked like something she loved, she would open it.
She opened it. Every day. Within two weeks she was catching her own burnout signals early for the first time in her life, and she was able to make choices because finally see the full picture. That outcome gets attributed to the tool. I want to be honest about what actually happened: the tool only got a chance to work because she thought it was cool.
I need to tell you a secret about that app. It was a re-skin.
I had already built the skeleton. The energy-pacing logic existed. When I started working with her, I took that skeleton and I painted it in dragons, because that is who she is. The underlying tool was identical to something that would have sat unused if I'd handed it to her plain. The only variable I changed was whether it looked like something she wanted to touch. And that single variable was the difference between a validated approach gathering dust and a woman starting to get her life back.
The thing nobody wants to call a design problem
Here is a sentence that appears in notes constantly, from coaches to therapists to other helping professionals: “non-compliance with treatment.”
It means the person didn’t do what was assigned. Maybe they didn’t use the worksheet, keep the log or practice the skill between sessions. The implication, even when nobody says it out loud, is that the failure belongs to the person. They lacked discipline, or insight, or motivation, or buy-in.
I look at that differently.
When someone does not use a tool, I do not start by asking what is wrong with them. I ask what is wrong with the tool.
Was it too bland? Too clinical? Too abstract? Too many steps? Too much like homework? Did it require them to become a tidier, calmer, more compliant version of themselves before it could help them?
Because that is usually where the real information is.
A tool that does not get used has an effectiveness of exactly zero, no matter how well-validated it is. And whether a tool gets used is not mostly a question of willpower. For me, it is a design question. It is about whether the thing is easy, meaningful, and even a little bit appealing to reach for at the exact moment a person needs it, which is usually their worst moment, when they have the least capacity to push through.
That is one of the central things I listen for in coaching.
Not just “what would help?” but “what would you actually touch?”
Not just “what should you track?” but “what would make you want to open the tracker?”
Not just “what strategy makes sense?” but “what would this need to look like for your real life, your attention, your private logic, your taste, your resistance, and your delight?”
We have built an entire culture of coaching tools that are meant to help but designed to be slightly unpleasant. Beige. Serious. Stripped of anything that might read as fun, because fun reads as unserious, and we have decided that meaningful support should feel like homework.
The person is not the problem.
The design is the clue.
Special interests are not symptoms. They are engines.
If the design is the clue, then for autistic clients, special interests are often the brightest clue in the room.
When an autistic person has an intense interest, it has historically been treated as something between a symptom and a management problem. Something to note, to gently redirect, to make sure is not “interfering.” The deep, consuming, joyful focus many autistic people have on a particular thing gets pathologized as restricted or obsessive, language that sounds clinical and means “too much.”
But that interest is frequently the single most reliable source of motivation an autistic person has.
When I built her tool around dragons, I was not indulging her. I was doing the most useful thing in the room, because I was building around the thing most likely to get her to engage.
The dragon was not a concession to her preferences.
The dragon was the intervention.
This is also something I listen for in coaching: not just what someone is struggling with, but what still lights up. What they can talk about for an hour. What they return to when nobody is grading it. What they feel slightly embarrassed to admit they love. What has survived shame, burnout, masking, bad advice, and years of being told to be more normal in a font size no one asked for. That's where I notice what may work.
There is another part of this, too. Many of the women I work with have learned to be embarrassed about what they love. I see it constantly.
Another client I built a tool for was nervous, almost apologetic, about admitting she wanted it in pastel mint. She braced like she was confessing something childish.
So I built the entire thing around pastel mint, because the bracing was part of the information.
A tool built around the thing you love, with no apology attached, is not just easier to use. It tells you that what delights you is allowed to be taken seriously. That is not a small message.
I am the proof of concept
I should be honest about where this conviction comes from, because it isn't detached professional observation. I am neurodivergent, and I have always known this about myself, long before I could have explained why.
I have six custom, self-hosted apps that I built and use. All of them are weird. One of them is a journal styled as Victorian correspondence, Bram Stoker by way of my own life, because I will absolutely keep a journal if opening it feels like opening a letter in a gothic novel and I will absolutely not keep one that looks like a productivity app. I go all in on atmosphere.
And here is the part that actually proves the point, because anyone can make a journal pretty. I theme the boring things too. I track my home server, my VPSs, my IP addresses, all the dull administrative bones of my setup, in an app styled as a naturalist's specimen log, like each machine is a beetle pinned in a Victorian collection. I keep my software licenses in something called App Cabinet, where every app is a sticker on a board, and when you click one it looks like you're peeling the sticker up off the page to read the license code on the back. There is no universe in which tracking IP addresses or software licenses is fun. These are the very definitions of not fun. But I will actually do it, reliably, if doing it feels like adding a specimen to a collection. The theme is not decoration laid over the task. The theme is the only reason the task gets done.
That is the whole mechanism, sitting right there in my own infrastructure. Delight is not the reward for doing the boring thing. Delight is how I trick myself into doing the boring thing at all.
I use the things I've made to fit me, and I built my whole life out of that fact, and then I built a coaching practice that does the same thing for other people.
What this actually means
If you build tools for neurodivergent people, or if you are a neurodivergent person trying to build tools for yourself, here is the whole thing in one line: the question is not "is this good for them." The question is "will they open it."
A perfect tool that stays closed does nothing. A decent tool wrapped in something a person genuinely loves gets opened, and an opened tool can change a life, or at least change what a helper is able to see and write down. We have spent a long time optimizing for the first thing and calling the second thing a distraction. We had it backwards.
Build it around the dragon. The dragon was never the decoration. The dragon was the point.