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
Interacting with Buttons
- 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.
- Users tried to switch between articles in the Progress List, but found that the articles were not clickable.
- 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 were tempted to keep clicking the "next" arrow until they reached the end.
Viewing Content
- When doing searches on Google, users wanted to be able to skim each article, instead of reading them entirely.
- Some people would have liked to know where the specific "chunk" of text was, relative to the rest of the article.
- Some people expressed frustration that they weren't able to switch to view other pages from the Progress List. This occurred because we did not make a mock-up of every page that Google showed.
- When articles chunked immediately, it was not obvious what the page looked like before being chunked.
- Many people were curious to know what commonly visited pages would look like, such as Wikipedia.
Design Iterations
First Iteration Feedback
- Informed user that they were able to use the keyboard to navigate. People used this to navigate chunks
- Changed Select Text Icon to an Icon that said Select Text
- Website is shown before being chunked, to give user an idea of what the page looks like before Refocus works it's magic.
- Added feature for being able to see, dimly, the text before the actual chunk.
- Allowed user to click on articles in their queue to skip to them.
- Added Wikipedia, as it was the first thing most users wanted to go to
Second Iteration
- 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.
- Instead of a gray background, text will be grayed out. This will allow the user to have reference to the page, without it being actively distracting.
- First time users will be prompted with hover over text messages on the main components of the UI, which will act as a non-intrusive tutorial.