We are now focusing on high school and college school students (as opposed to all sufferers of ADHD) in an academic setting.
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.
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
Efficiency: Low
Safety: High
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
Efficiency: High
Safety: Medium
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
Efficiency: High
Max:
Kai:
Jake:
Anvisha:
