• Created by Unknown User (mkolysh@mit.edu), last modified by Unknown User (kliao@mit.edu) on Mar 09, 2013 18:12

GR2

Updates from GR1

We are now focusing on high school and college school students (as opposed to all sufferers of ADHD) in an academic setting.

Scenario

Robby is a high school junior who has been taking medication for his ADHD for the past three years. He’s noticed his grades dropping recently, and he’s starting to realize that it’s because he has trouble focusing on his homework. Specifically, when he’s assigned to read short stories for his English class or news articles for his Economics class, he can’t help but get distracted as soon as he starts reading. Sometimes, he loses focus and forgets the task at hand. The articles are usually online, and it’s very easy for him to open up a new tab and start browsing Imgur.com, his favorite website. Even though he knows he should be doing the reading, he ends up wasting a lot of time going back and forth between the article and other websites, and the small bits of the article that he actually reads, he struggles to comprehend well. He usually ends up getting frustrated and stops reading altogether -- in fact, for the past semester, he hasn’t even attempted to read any of the long reading assignments for school.

Robby’s mom has tried to help him by printing the articles out and watching over him as he reads them, and while this is slightly better than reading them online, he still struggles to understand the information and often glosses over the same sentence without extracting any meaning from it. His mom is especially worried that she won’t be able to give him the same kind of attention when he goes off to college, and that his grades will suffer even more, since longer readings are more often assigned. Robby realizes the problem and wants to make an effort to get better -- he’s willing to experiment with new methods for staying focused and learning.

Storyboards

Storyboard 1: Trim

The "Trim" is our most minimalistic, taking into account the fact that it's incredibly easy for people with ADHD to get distracted by any excess information on the page. We hope that this design will reduce distractions for people with mild ADHD as well as increase physical engagement with the webpage that they are reading.

The design breaks apart walls of text into small, manageable chunks, presenting each to the user at a time, while fading out the background to minimize distractions.

Learnability: High

  • simple
  • buttons are clearly labeled and obvious

Efficiency: Low

  • user navigates between consecutive segments by pressing right or left arrow keys on their keyboard, or click the arrow buttons with their mouse
  • many clicks to get through a single webpage
  • the amount of content presented at a time is very limited

Safety: High

  • there are very few actions a user can take at any point in time
  • all actions are represented by large, externally consistent buttons
  • easy to return to previous chunk by clicking left button if right button pressed too many times

Storyboard 2: Read

The "Read" design was a more extreme design, optimized for those students with severe ADHD, or even with both ADHD and eyesight problems. Some ADHD sufferers expressed that simply the act of reading is difficult, and that they often like content to be presented through different formats and media. While they would often gloss over sentences when reading them, they wouldn't be as prone to zoning out when someone is talking to them directly. To address these requests, we created this design as an audio interface for the webpage, much like a screen-reader. The user can ask for the software to read the headings, select a specific heading that they want it to read, repeat a particular section, etc.

Learnability: Low

  • requires some training to learn what voice commands are available to the user (select section, repeat section, etc.)
  • users may have to experiment with settings before finding the optimal settings for greater efficiency

Efficiency: High

  • users can quickly zone in on a specific section of content
  • speed of reading voice can be adjusted to get through more material at a faster pace for efficient users
  • potential information absorption rate is much higher than "Trim"

Safety: Medium

  • can ask software to go back and repeat if command is known
  • possible for users to get lost and make errors if commands are inputted incorrectly

Storyboard 3: Enhance

Our "Enhance" design is, in terms of amount of content presented, diametrically opposite from our "Trim" design. Some of our interviewees let us know that an abundance of information is not always a bad thing, as long as it is presented in different media (not just long-form text). "Enhance" allows you to plan out several articles or stories that you wish to read ahead of time. Then, once you finish planning and begin reading, it provides you with tools to enhance your understanding of the content -- you can take notes on selected chunks of text in the sidebar, queue tangential links that you may want to visit later (to avoid real-time distraction), and view your progress through your agenda up to that point in time. 

Learnability: High 

  • gamified features and buttons
  • features are clearly laid out (points received, timer functions, etc.)

Efficiency: High

  • power users can plan out an agenda and read through their chosen articles
  • points are given systematically to provide incentive
    Safety: Medium
  • added functionality may be confusing
  • mistakes that users make are not severe
  • can delete notes that were created accidentally and go back to chunks that were accidentally skipped

Design Sketches

Max:



Kai:



Jake:


Anvisha:



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1 Comment

  1. Sarah E Lehmann

    Scenario: Your tasks should have been more concretely laid out--it was difficult to pick out actual tasks from your scenario writeup and being able to highlight those tasks would have made your initial designs richer.
    Preliminary designs: For your individual designs, it would have been nice to have a 1-2 sentence description for each to give context to the designs. I also wish that you would have added some explaination related to the scenario for each design to be able to effectively compare them--it was difficult to know what to look for in the designs without knowing which tasks were being performed. Finally, it was hard to really get a sense of each of the storyboard designs with minimal frames.
    Wiki Presentation: Some of your scans are very difficult to see.
    Overall: Looking forward, your first design definitely seems very sequential and very difficult to use. I think some combination of designs 2 and 3 will make for a very rich project--I'm afraid that leaning towards design 1 isn't enough of a stretch for this class. 
    Good luck moving forward with GR3 and, as always, contact me if you have any questions or want early feedback on prototypes!