GR2

Updates from GR1

We are 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. 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: