Pictures of the first iteration of our prototype. 
Briefing
- You are a High School Student who has ADHD. You have been assigned to research "The Epic of Gilgamesh" for a school, but you have a lot of trouble focusing. You have installed Refocus.io to help you with this task.
Scenario Tasks
- Search for the "Epic of Gilgamesh" on Google.
- Add links of interest to the Refocus.io queue.
- Activate the Refocus.io functionality to start reading the article.
- Read through the article using Refocus.io
Observations
- Users thought the idea was good, and many commented they would probably be interested in using this in their day to day reading of articles.
- When doing searches on Google, users wanted to be able to skim each article, instead of reading them entirely.
- The "Select Text" icon and functionality were unintuitive. When it was described to users, they actually felt it was the most useful feature.
- When reading "chunks" of an article, clicking the "next" arrow was distracting.
- Some people commented they would have liked to know where the "chunked' text was, relative to the rest of the article.
- One problem we ran into is we weren't able to model all the behaviors (for example, we weren't able to make a mock-up of every page that Googled showed). Some people expressed frustration that they weren't able to switch to another page in their Queue
- When articles chunked immediately, it wasn't obvious what the page looked like before being chunked.
Design Iterations
First iteration
- Changed Select Text Icon to an Icon that said Select Text
- Added feature for being able to see, dimly, the text behind the actual chunk. This allows to the user an idea of where they are in the page.
- Allowed user to click on articles in their queue to skip to them.
- Created more specific chunking for certain websites. For example, wikipedia. This allows a user to go to an article like "World War II", but only read the part on the Pacific Front.