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The "Read" design was a more extreme design, optimized for those students with severe ADHD, or even with both ADHD and eyesight problems.
Design Sketches
Some ADHD sufferers expressed that simply the act of reading is difficult, and that they often like content to be presented in different formats. 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. The learnability of this design is fairly low, as it requires some training to learn what voice commands are available to the user (select section, repeat section, etc.) The design is efficient. It allows users to quickly zone in on a specific section of content (if they know the commands to do so) and to increase the speed of the reading voice accordingly. For some of our target users, this actually ends up being more efficient -- given that efficiency is measured by how much information the user absorbs -- than the other two designs. The design allows for some safety measures, such as asking the software to repeat a sentence or an instruction, but it is possible for users to get lost and make errors if they are new to the interface.
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. Like "Trim", the actual content is presented in shorter chunks. We also are considering gamifying the user experience, giving the user more incentive to finish their reading in an allotted amount of time. This design, although complex, has high learnability, as all of the features are presented to the user very clearly. It is also efficient, as power users can plan out an agenda and read through their chosen articles as quickly as they would have otherwise (without this tool). Safety may be an issue because of the added functionality, but the mistakes that the user can make are not very severe (accidentally adding a note or skipping to the next chunk) so this is not a huge consideration for us.
Design Sketches
Max:
Kai:
Jake:
Anvisha:
