Navigating Financial Lives: How Autistic Adults Adapt Financial Technologies, Tools and Strategies
Helena Lyhme, Belen Barros Pena, Stephanie Wilson · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26) · doi:10.1145/3772318.3791131
Summary
This CHI 2026 paper is, to the authors' knowledge, the first HCI study of how autistic adults navigate their financial lives — budgeting, banking, bill-paying, saving, managing unpredictability — using, adapting, and re-inventing financial technologies. The authors ground the work in neuroqueer technoscience (Walker) and crip technoscience (Hamraie and Fritsch), positioning autistic participants not as passive recipients of financial technology but as knowers and makers who actively shape, subvert, and repurpose tools to resist assimilationist logics. The paper connects to a broader HCI literature on moneywork — the invisible practical, cognitive, and emotional labour of managing money — and argues that this labour has unique shape for autistic adults, who statistically experience higher rates of un- and under-employment and financial hardship. The study draws on 20 semi-structured interviews with UK-based autistic adults (11 female, 7 male, 2 non-binary; ages 18-61+), recruited via the Autistica research-participation newsletter with official-diagnosis requirement and fraud-screening. Nine participants disclosed co-occurring ADHD and many reported chronic illness, mental-health struggles, or burnout. The authors developed and applied Collaborative Visual Thinking (CVT) — a method building on Collaborative Drawing and Sketching Dialogue in which researcher and participant co-create a visual artefact (sketch, spreadsheet screenshot, mind map) during a 90-minute interview, organised by four guiding concepts: Income, Storage, Outgoings, People, and Tools/Technologies. Analysis used reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke) with contextualist epistemology.
Key findings
Seven sub-themes structured the findings. (1) Analytical skills and number comfort varied — some participants leveraged deep analytical thinking as a moneywork strength (custom spreadsheets updated daily), while others rejected the "Rain Man" stereotype. (2) Attention patterns including hyperfocus and detail-orientation helped tracking but risked tipping into obsession (P1 abandoned a spreadsheet that became "absolutely fatal"). (3) Control and categorisation drove widespread use of account separation, earmarking, and digital cash pots (physical or app-based) to enforce boundaries that the frictionlessness of digital banking erodes. (4) Unpredictability and uncertainty motivated heavy routine, advance planning, and double-entry bookkeeping. (5) Social communication differences contributed to higher-than-expected reports of interpersonal financial abuse (4 of 20 participants). (6) Sensory and cognitive overload drove preferences for minimalism (pen-and-paper, simple apps, no notifications) and for carefully-tuned automation. (7) Co-occurring conditions — especially ADHD, burnout, and fluctuating mental health — produced impulsive spending, decision paralysis, and demand avoidance. Of 20 participants, 13 said autism-related struggles in moneywork outweighed the positives; 4 were neutral; 3 said autism gave them a net advantage. Tools in use included online banking (all 20), current accounts (17), direct debits (16), pen and paper (14), credit cards (11), PayPal (10), digital wallets (10), spreadsheets (7), digital cash pots (2), and gamified/colour-coded personal systems. The authors distill six design tensions for inclusive fintech: simplification vs depth, minimalism vs aesthetics, automation vs control, removing friction vs adding friction, gamification vs fixation, and a sixth implied axis around emotional engagement. Notable finding: autistic joy (Wassell) emerged as a productive moneywork resource — colour-coded spreadsheets, cute tracking apps, personal saving challenges reframed finance from anxiety to agency.
Relevance
For practitioners designing financial technology, banking apps, or any money-adjacent product, the paper is an explicit argument against frictionless, one-size-fits-all defaults. Several design moves are directly actionable: expose layered access (simple overview plus optional depth), let users personalise visual style (colour, animation, density) to calibrate sensory load, make automation transparent and toggleable rather than opaque, and treat friction as a user-configurable tool for self-regulation rather than a UX failure. The documented vulnerability to interpersonal financial abuse (4/20) argues for protective features designed for users embedded in care networks, not idealised independent decision-makers. The findings also transfer to neighbouring populations — ADHD, anxiety, OCD, dementia, post-traumatic stress — who share overlapping sensitivities to unpredictability, cognitive load, and impulsivity. Limitations to flag: UK-only, UK-banking-only, very few participants of colour, no non-speaking autistic participants or participants with learning disabilities, and a sample skewed toward participants comfortable engaging in a video-call interview. The neuroqueer-technoscience framing deliberately resists distilling a bullet list of design implications; practitioners adapting the tensions should expect to make context-specific trade-offs rather than apply a universal pattern.
Tags: autism · neurodiversity · fintech · financial accessibility · moneywork · qualitative research · neuroqueer technoscience · cognitive accessibility