You've welcomed a new customer to your site. They’ve made it past your cookie banner, navigated the sign-in or account creation process, and landed on your homepage.
Now what?
For many users, especially people with disabilities, the biggest barriers come after the first click. These customers are navigating your product listings, filtering options, and checkout flows. And too often, what should be a straightforward journey becomes a cognitive maze.
Dense layouts, confusing filters, poor visual hierarchy, and incomplete feedback may seem like minor friction points for most users. But for someone with a disability—especially cognitive, visual, or motor impairments—these choices can be exclusionary.
This is where accessible UX needs to go beyond meeting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) checkpoints. We need to design for clarity, calm, and recovery.
This article is the third in our Bias by Design series, following:
Part 1: Why AI Personalization Often Excludes People with Disabilities—And How Retailers Can Fix It
Part 2: First Impressions Matter: Why Accessibility Has to Start at the First Click
Now, we explore how complex decision-making workflows create silent exclusion for people with disabilities, and how Concord can help.
Decision fatigue refers to the mental exhaustion that happens when users are faced with too many choices, unclear pathways, or unnecessarily complex interactions. In e-commerce, this often appears as:
Users with ADHD, dyslexia, low vision, motor impairments, or vestibular disorders may struggle to complete tasks or make informed decisions. And what appears to be “just a little friction” can ultimately cause them to abandon the journey entirely.
Imagine a user with ADHD visiting your site to buy a pair of headphones. They are immediately presented with a filtering panel offering more than thirty options, most of which are unchecked by default. As they scroll, a promotional pop-up appears offering a discount in exchange for an email address. They dismiss the pop-up only to find the page has reloaded, losing their place.
The product listings are cluttered, with long names and tabs hiding specs, reviews, and warranty information. If the user finally adds an item to their cart and moves to checkout, they may encounter a form that resets if any field is entered incorrectly or a session that times out before payment is completed, even after extending the time limit.
While none of these moments may register as accessibility violations, together they represent a UX design that is cognitively exhausting and difficult to complete. For users with ADHD or similar disabilities, the process can become so taxing that they abandon their purchase altogether.
Exclusion in digital experiences often isn't the result of a single dramatic flaw. Instead, it builds up through a series of minor decisions that favor speed, efficiency, or aesthetics over clarity and usability. Here are just a few examples:
Individually, each of these issues may seem small. But together, they create an experience that is difficult to complete and even harder to recover from. That’s the essence of decision fatigue.
Inclusive UX is not just about checking boxes on a compliance list. It’s about creating a digital environment where all users can navigate, understand, and complete tasks with confidence. To do that, we must design for clarity.
To reduce cognitive load and support decision-making:
Meeting WCAG standards is a great start, but it’s not the end goal. Many digital teams feel confident their sites are "accessible" because they pass automated tests. Yet these same sites may be confusing, cognitively demanding, or simply unfriendly to people who process information differently.
We believe the question should be: Can every user, regardless of ability, confidently make a decision on this page? Can they recover if they make a mistake? Do they feel respected in how their time and attention are treated?
If the answer isn’t a clear yes, then there’s more work to do.
At Concord, we help digital teams move beyond accessibility as a checklist and toward inclusive, thoughtful experience design. Our accessibility and UX specialists work together to identify decision fatigue triggers across your most important user flows. We simulate real-world behavior using assistive tech, slow inputs, and cognitive load scenarios.
We partner with our clients to rework filtering systems, shopping flows, and comparison tools to be more intuitive. We build design systems that embed accessibility from the ground up and scale those patterns across teams and platforms. And we bring in the voices of real users to ensure we’re not just optimizing for speed, but designing for trust and clarity.
Good UX helps users complete a task. Great UX helps users feel confident along the way.
When your digital experience constantly demands more attention, effort, or troubleshooting from some users than others, you’re not creating an equal experience. Bias by design happens when we prioritize speed over clarity, quantity over focus, and aesthetics over usability.
Accessible design is not about making your experience simpler—it’s about making it understandable. That’s the difference between a usable site and a truly inclusive one.
Reach out to our accessibility and UX teams at Concord to learn how to create inclusive journeys that help all users make clear, confident decisions—without fatigue.
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