A toolkit is only useful if people use it: what we learned with Queen Mary
- Divergent Thinking
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 6 hours ago
A strong piece of research can still end up sitting quietly in a downloads folder. This collaboration with Queen Mary asked a harder question: what would make organisations actually use it?
The awkward truth about toolkits
There is a familiar moment at the end of a research project. Everyone agrees the work matters. The webpage goes live. The PDF is downloaded. Then the real world returns: overflowing inboxes, competing priorities, limited budgets and somebody asking, “Whose job is this?”
PDFs do not implement themselves.
That was the starting point for my work with Queen Mary University of London and its Autistic Adults Online programme. The research team had already done the important work of listening to autistic adults and co-designing practical guidance for more inclusive digital spaces. Our job was not to create another awareness session or rewrite the research in shinier language. It was to find the missing bridge between a useful toolkit and changed practice.
During Neurodiversity Celebration Week, in March 2026, Divergent Thinking co-hosted an online roundtable with Professor Nelya Koteyko and Dr Simona Manni. We wanted to know what landed with practitioners, what would get in their way and what kind of support they would genuinely use after the call ended.
At a glance
Partner: Queen Mary University of London
Research programme: Autistic Adults Online
Divergent Thinking role: workshop design, facilitation, participant engagement and evidence synthesis
Format: 60 minutes of highly visual, interactive activity followed by 15 minutes of questions
Reach: 165 registrations, around 50 live attendees and 34 active interactive contributors
The research we were working with
Autistic Adults Online is a participatory research programme exploring how autistic adults experience social media and digital platforms. Queen Mary’s official research overview explains that autistic perspectives did not simply sit beside the research: they helped shape the questions, methods and resulting guidance.
The roundtable built on the free Co-Designing Online Platforms with Autistic Users toolkit. It brings together evidence and participatory methods for UX researchers, designers and developers, alongside guidance for digital managers and content creators in public and third-sector organisations.
That distinction matters. Some people in the room could influence an entire platform. Others could change only the wording of an email, the rules of an online community, an onboarding journey or the way privacy is explained. Inclusive practice has to be useful at both levels.
One line from project contributor Jack Welch captures the principle beautifully:
“Autistic people’s communication isn’t broken or lacking, it’s just different.”
The point was never to teach autistic people to cope better with confusing systems. It was to ask how the systems, teams and digital habits around them could become clearer, safer and easier to control.
The pilot changed the brief
Before the main event, we ran a smaller pilot in February using slides, Mentimeter and Miro. we wanted to test more than whether the content “worked”. We tested the framing, the pace, the tone and the different routes people had for contributing.
The pilot surfaced a very useful tension. People wanted tangible advice—quite reasonably, they wanted to know what to do on Monday morning. But a universal checklist would risk suggesting that every autistic person has the same needs.
The answer was not a longer list. It was a better structure: evidence to help people notice barriers, practical prompts and examples, then enough flexibility to adapt them with the autistic people affected by the decisions.
That early session also changed the questions we took into March. Instead of asking only how specialist teams might embed the toolkit, we focused on two more fundamental issues: which parts felt useful across different workplaces, and what learning or support would make uptake more likely?
Then 165 people registered
The level of interest changed the room before the room even existed.
Education was the largest identifiable group, but registrations also came from charities, public-sector organisations, digital and communications teams, facilitators, EDI and disability leads, and people joining through personal email addresses. The final session had to make sense to people with very different levels of technical knowledge—and very different amounts of power to change things.
So we adapted again.
The roundtable became a 75-minute cross-sector adoption lab: one hour of visual, anonymous and interactive prompts, followed by 15 minutes for questions. Professor Nelya Koteyko framed the research; Divergent Thinking facilitated the conversation about real-world use; and smaller Miro workshops were offered separately for people who wanted to go deeper.
We also removed breakout rooms. A breakout room is not automatically inclusive simply because it is interactive. At this scale, it would have required more facilitators and introduced more social uncertainty, variable experiences and pressure to speak. Anonymous Mentimeter input gave people a predictable route to contribute without performing confidence in front of strangers.
About 50 people joined live and 34 actively contributed through Mentimeter. Those figures describe different stages of engagement, so I would not collapse them into a suspiciously neat “impact percentage”. What they show is strong interest, a substantial live audience and a core group willing to give structured, usable input.
What the room told us
Much of digital exclusion is made from small, repeatable frictions. Individually they can look minor. Together they create a constant tax on attention, confidence and energy.
Clarity is an accessibility feature
Ambiguous requests, implied expectations and tone misreads came up repeatedly. When a message leaves the reader to work out what it really means, whether a response is expected and how quickly they should act, the hidden task is decoding.
Clearer rules and explicit expectations are sometimes dismissed as “dumbing down”. They are nothing of the sort. They remove work that never needed to exist.
Control is more useful than guesswork
Participants talked about movement, autoplay, GIFs, clutter, visual noise and too much happening at once. They also highlighted the anxiety created when it is unclear who can see a post, message or profile detail.
The common thread was control: control over motion and presentation, control over what is visible to whom, and clear explanations of what will happen next. These are not decorative accessibility extras. They shape whether somebody can participate with confidence.
Governance is part of the design
Generic “be kind” messages were not enough. Contributors wanted explicit community rules, predictable moderation, visible escalation routes and fair handling of harmful content.
This matters because an inclusive digital experience is not created only by a designer. It is also created—or undermined—by the people writing the rules, moderating conversations, setting response expectations and deciding what happens when something goes wrong.
The most useful insight was not a design feature
The biggest blockers were organisational.
People did not tell us they lacked evidence. They talked about lack of time, unclear ownership, competing priorities, minimum-compliance thinking, weak leadership sponsorship and too little lived-experience input. They anticipated the questions many inclusion leads know by heart: Where will the funding come from? Why change something that appears to work? Why go beyond the minimum?
These objections are not inconvenient side notes to hide at the end of a training deck. They are part of the design brief.
If guidance has no owner, no protected time and no credible first step, it becomes everybody’s good idea and nobody’s next action. Adoption support therefore has to help people make the case, identify who can act and begin somewhere realistic.
What people said they would actually use
The strongest preference was for implementation scaffolding rather than another dense PDF:
Templates and checklists for community rules, onboarding, privacy explanations and “how this works” guidance
Train-the-trainer slides and scripts that internal teams can adapt rather than starting from nothing
Focused 15–20 minute microlearning instead of one long course
Before-and-after examples that make common digital friction visible
Multimodal materials by default, including transcripts, accessible written versions and alternatives to video-only learning
There was a simple idea underneath all of this: learning should leave evidence in the workplace. A module should end with something tangible—a revised rule, a template, a policy paragraph, a configuration check or a clearer onboarding step.
That is the difference between a conversation people enjoyed and a practice they can repeat.
What happened next
The responses did not disappear into my presentation folder. The Queen Mary team retained the data for further analysis, and participants received links to the research website, toolkit, downloadable evidence cards and design cards.
Follow-on Miro workshops were organised for technology and business, higher education and the public sector, and freelancers, activists and third-sector organisations. The findings were also identified as inputs for a training-pack outline, practical adoption support and measurement guidance that could combine simple organisational measures with feedback from autistic users.
Queen Mary discussed the responses with its commercialisation support and considered routes for further funding. The team also approved a public project recap, published it on the Autistic Adults Online website with me as the author, and added me to the project team page. That independent article creates a public record of the collaboration and connects the facilitation directly to the underlying research.
What this project proved—and what it did not
Credibility does not improve when we pretend a workshop proved more than it did.
The registration numbers, live participation, structured feedback and client comments support a clear but bounded conclusion: the roundtable reached a mixed audience, generated useful implementation insight and gave the research team material for the next stage of dissemination and training design.
It does not yet prove that participating organisations changed their platforms, that autistic users had a better experience or that the toolkit achieved widespread adoption. Those are longer-term outcomes. They need follow-up with organisations and, most importantly, feedback from the autistic people affected by any changes.
A sensible next evaluation step would be to record which tools are adopted, check after 30–90 days what teams changed, collect examples of revised communication or governance, and ask autistic users whether the result feels clearer, safer or easier to control. Every percentage should keep its denominator. Every success claim should keep its humility.
What I would carry into the next project
Start with behaviour, not awareness. Ask what people need to do differently and what currently stops them.
Pilot the participation method, not only the content. Accessibility lives in pacing, predictability and contribution routes as much as it does in slides.
Design for the audience that actually arrives. Registration data may require a change of language, interaction or scope.
Treat objections as useful evidence. Time, ownership, funding and leadership are implementation requirements, not somebody else’s problem.
Leave people with something they can change. A good session should create a next action, an artefact or a decision—not simply a warm feeling.
This is the bit of neuroinclusive work I find most interesting: not producing a perfect answer from a distance, but creating the conditions for people to notice more, ask better questions and make a useful change where they are.
What the Queen Mary team said
“Thanks for such a great workshop, Nat! You are such a natural as a facilitator. I think people loved it and we got a lot of really useful information for the future.”
— Dr Simona Manni, project team
“That was brilliant! Looking forward to digging into responses.”
— Professor Nelya Koteyko, research lead
From research to practice
Divergent Thinking helps universities, public bodies, charities and employers turn neuroinclusion evidence into accessible engagement, training and practical tools. My approach combines lived experience, applied neuroscience and structured facilitation, with clear boundaries around what the evidence can support.
If your research is valuable but adoption feels stuck, explore Divergent Thinking’s neurodiversity training and workshops or email nat@divergentthinking.uk. We can start with the audience, the behaviour you want to influence and the evidence worth collecting.
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