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)); }
