The spoon-dial: capacity-aware financial UI for neurodivergent users

Financial dashboards are built for peak attention. Dense grids, live tickers,
twenty widgets competing for one pair of eyes. For the roughly 1.3 billion
people living with significant disability — 16% of the global population —
that interface is not merely unfriendly, it is a barrier to managing their own
money. The P31 spoon-dial starts from the opposite assumption: the user knows
their capacity, and the interface should adapt to it.

The spoon model is a 0–5 cognitive-capacity dial. At 5 the user is fully
available; at 0 they are in crisis. Every surface maps three axes to that
number: motion, density, and disclosure. Motion scales by level — 4–5 at full
scale, 3 at 0.6, 1–2 at 0.2, 0 at zero. Density and disclosure follow the same
curve.

At spoons 1–2 the screen shows the top three widgets only, with progressive
disclosure; at 5 the full grid expands. At 0, motion is disabled entirely and a
CalmOverlay replaces the live dashboard with a single settling surface.
Feedback follows five states rather than binary good/bad, so a borderline
number does not read as catastrophe.

The research basis is the spoons construct from spoon theory plus established
WCAG and reduced-motion guidance — full citations live in
SPOON_MODEL_RESEARCH.md. The contrast with density-first fintech is
deliberate: one number drives the entire interface instead of every number
competing.

Implementing the dial is a few CSS custom properties and one state machine.
Motion scale and widget count key off the spoon value, so the interface is
declarative rather than branchy.

:root { --spoons: 3; --motion-scale: 0.6; }
@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) { --motion-scale: 0; }
.widget { transform: scale(var(--motion-scale)); }