Our approach
Three ideas that shape the practice
Trauma-informed content design is a young discipline built on older ones, including journalism, content design, accessibility, clinical practice and regulatory compliance. It draws on all of them and collapses into none. This page sets out the three ideas that do the heaviest lifting in our work, and why each of them changes what good content looks like.
A companion page, Our practice, sets out what we actually do about them. The commercial and regulatory case for why any of this matters is on About us.
01
Who this work is for
Organisations often talk about vulnerable customers or vulnerable users as if vulnerability were a property of certain people — a category you belong to, a box ticked on a form. That framing is convenient. It is also wrong, and the FCA’s own vulnerability guidance makes clear that vulnerability is driven by circumstance, not demographics. The four drivers the guidance identifies — health, life events, resilience and capability — are states that most people pass through, not populations that some people belong to.
Vulnerability is temporary, situational and close to universal. Grief. Illness. Sleep deprivation. Financial shock. Caring for someone who is deteriorating. A diagnosis. A break-up. A redundancy. A missed period. A bill that arrived on the wrong day. Cognitive capacity varies hour by hour, and the factors that reduce it are ordinary, not exotic.
This changes who the work is for. Designing content for people at full capacity and then separately accommodating the vulnerable treats the minority case as a special population and the majority case as an assumption. In practice, the majority case is the special population. Most people meeting high-stakes content are meeting it on a bad day, not their best one.
Designing for reduced capacity as the baseline serves people in acute distress, who cannot engage with anything else. It also serves everyone else on the ordinary bad days that make up most of a working life. The content gets better for everyone, including the people who, on a good day, were fine.
02
The full spectrum
The field has become reasonably good at designing for macro-trauma — the life-altering events that organisations can see coming. A cancer diagnosis. A bereavement. A domestic violence disclosure. A fraud report. Processes exist. Training exists. Dedicated content teams exist.
It is still mostly blind to micro-trauma: the accumulation of everyday cognitive load that erodes a person’s ability to process information. A 70-page manual that requires postgraduate reading ability to complete a registration form. A letter that uses five different terms for the same thing. An error message that blames the user for a system failure. None of these is traumatic on its own. Encountered in sequence, by a person already tired and already worried, they produce the same outcome as a single acute event: cognitive capacity collapses, comprehension fails, and the interaction breaks down.
Both ends of that spectrum belong in scope. A practice that handles macro-trauma but ignores micro-trauma fails most users on most days. A practice that handles micro-trauma but ignores macro-trauma fails users at the moments that matter most. It is the same work.
03
The research gap
Most user research talks to people about what happened. Afterwards. Calmly. With the worst behind them. Participants are recruited, briefed, scheduled and paid. They arrive with the cognitive capacity to reflect — to remember, to articulate, to rank and rate. They describe a form they struggled with last month, a letter that worried them in February, a service they eventually worked out how to use.
That is lived experience. Retrospective, reflective, tidy. It is what a well-run research programme captures, and it is genuinely useful for a particular set of questions.
It is not what a person experiences the moment they actually meet your content. Living experience is that moment. It is the bereaved partner opening the pension letter before they have told anyone. It is the parent reading cancer information in a hospital car park. It is the claimant at 11pm with the browser window open and the deadline tomorrow. Capacity is reduced. Attention is fractured. The next click matters more than the last six months of careful design thinking.
User research, as most organisations practise it, structurally cannot capture living experience. Ethics committees will not allow you to recruit participants in the middle of a crisis, and a person in that state has neither the capacity nor the inclination to narrate what they are going through to a stranger with a screen recorder.
The result is a practice that tests content on people in lived experience and treats the results as if they describe living experience. They don’t. Content that tested well with cancer patients in remission failed people in active treatment. Content that worked for people recalling their Universal Credit claim failed people making one. The answer is not to abandon user research. It is to be honest about what it measures, and to treat cognitive load under reduced capacity as a first-class design constraint rather than an edge case discovered after launch.
