ACF: An Autistic Personas’ Characteristics Source to Develop Empathy in Software Development Teams

Empathizing with the software’s future users allows knowledge of their willingness and needs, enabling interfaces more attractive. Similarly, empathizing with autistic users is, above all, understanding their limitations and try to see things and people from their perspective. Despite the importance of the empathizing process, traditional requirements survey methods do not allow this for the autistic audience, mainly for those considered low-functioning. A low-functioning autistic users have a more significant impairment of their skills. Thereby, there is a need for methods that consider their difficulties and support the software requirements elicitation process for autistic users. Therefore, this paper proposes the ACF (Autistic’s Characterization Form), composed of sections representing the four areas of impairment of an autistic person. With the ACF, we provide a set of characteristics representing enough information to support generating empathy between a designer and an autistic person during the requirements gathering phase. We also present a graph called AOG (Autistic’s Overview Graph), which shows the disability rate of the autistic person in each area of limitation of the disorder. Through this work, we intend to support interface designers willing to build empathy during the user interfaces’ requirements elicitation and creation processes.