About
Pratik is a senior product designer with over 8 years of experience across enterprise SaaS, financial services, and consumer products. He has shaped design at Coursera, HubSpot, and MassMutual, working at the intersection of growth, activation, and platform thinking. His work tends to live in the messy, consequential parts of a product: the flows that determine whether a user activates or churns, the systems that make complex products feel coherent, the decisions that sit somewhere between design and product strategy. Inclusion is central to how he designs, with a particular focus on building experiences that work for neurodiverse users from the start, not as an afterthought. Beyond his day job, Pratik mentors designers through various platforms and is active in the broader design community as a writer, speaker, and design judge. He believes the most important design decisions happen before any pixels are placed, which is the thinking he brings to his work, his mentoring, and his public writing.
Talk details
Designing for 1.6 Billion People We Keep Forgetting
About this talk
Most AI talks make the same argument. AI is changing everything, move fast, stay relevant. This talk makes a different one. 1 in 5 people worldwide is neurodivergent. The AI products being designed right now will define how people work and learn for the next decade, and most are being built without that 5th person in mind. Microsoft's Persona Spectrum research showed that designing for users with the highest friction improves the experience for everyone. Closed captions and voice control started as accessibility features and became universal defaults. The same pattern is available in AI today. This talk walks through four barriers neurodivergent users face and shows where AI closes each gap with tools most teams already have. The improvements do not stop at neurodivergent users. They compound across the entire product. The barrier is not technical. It is a decision. This talk gives design leaders the argument to make that call.
Key takeaway
- Inclusive design is not a values statement. It is a product strategy. The teams building AI with neurodivergent users in mind are producing experiences that work better for everyone, and they are doing it with tools already in their stack.
- There are four specific, well-documented barriers neurodivergent users face in digital products today. Each one is solvable. This talk shows exactly how.
- The cost of retrofitting inclusion into an established AI system is exponentially higher than building it in from the start. The decisions being made right now are the ones that will be hardest to undo later.
- Design leaders are the only people in most organizations who sit at the intersection of user insight, product direction, and organizational influence. That position comes with a responsibility most teams have not acted on yet.
- The design patterns being normalized in AI products today will become the standards every product follows. What gets built in this window will shape who technology serves for the next decade. This talk is about making sure that answer is everyone.