GR2

Updates from GR1

• we’re 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. 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. The user navigates between consecutive segments by clicking right or left arrows on their keyboard (or the arrows with their mouse). This reduces the efficiency of the design, as it takes many clicks to get through a single webpage and the amount of content presented at a time is very limited. The design is very safe, however, because there are very few actions a user can take at any point in time, all of which are represented by large, externally consistent buttons that can be easily undone (for example, clicking the left arrow after accidentally clicking the right arrow). Additionally, the simplicity makes this design quickly learnable to our users. Mainly, 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. 

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. 

Design Sketches