Observations and Interviews
Social Worker/Guidance Counselor
- Works with college age students in a private practice. Also runs a K-12 guidance department at a mid size school.*
- Social Involvement of others is important to improving attention*
- People with ADHD understand they have a problem. A common behavior is installing self help software and then not using it/uninstalling it.*
- Tedious and boring material is so unappealing in relationship with easy access engagement and stimulation*
- Precipitous drop in the grades of ADHD kids who are given iPads in the classroom*
- Reward systems have proven effective where stimulation is given in exchange for accomplishment*
MIT Course 16 Senior
- Long unordered lists get ignored, while lists with a clear hierarchy of titles or ideas are very attractive.*
- Graphics and colors get noticed first, things that are familiar or expected or easier to look at and more appealing*
- Low tolerance for sites that take more than a few seconds to understand*
- Chunking improves ability to scan/comprehend*
- It is important to keep track of useful information to pull up and see all together (e.x. Summaries)*
Dina Course 9 Junior
- Has difficulty starting tasks, doesn’t know what approach to take*
- Hyperfocuses on specific things. This tends to happen with hands-on work*
- Low capacity for working memory: losing thread in the middle of a paragraph/long questions.*
- Breaks information into parts to deal with it. Switches between topics and tasks to keep interested. Sets goals to accomplish before starting to work, and writes them down.*
- Plans rigid time blocks in which to do activities*
User Analysis/Groups
From our observations and interviews, we identified two broad user groups: students with ADHD, as well as their parents, friends, teachers or other interested parties.
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For students especially, teachers and counselors take an active role in helping them with ADHD, and so form a part of the user group for this problem. Their needs include being able to help the student tackle the internet browsing problem and receive feedback on how the student is doing. This is more applicable to high school students with ADHD.
From the people we interviewed: Tom Denton
Needs/Goals
3 High level goals:
Goals reflect three main stages of interacting with webpages
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