Helping Autistic Young Adults Fight Privacy Violations: Designing a Gamified App

Autistic social media users experience more privacy violations and resulting harms than the general population. Prior work suggests increasing digital literacy can help protect against such harms. We investigate the design of a self-paced mobile app that can be widely accessible to autistic social media users. In order to motivate users to actually learn these educational materials, we explore how to gamify the app. We conducted a participatory design session with 3 autistic adults to examine preferred gamification style and deployed a survey with 6 autistic adults to investigate the preferred user interface aesthetics, which is especially important to consider for this population. We found that participants preferred customizable games which didn't cause cognitive overload. Aesthetically, participants preferred realistic and video game artistic styles.