Elephant Eating
Project Overview
Elephant Eating is a scheduling and planning app designed for neurodivergent individuals, specifically those who have ADHD.
Information
Timeline: July 2022 - September 2022
Platform: Mobile App
Tools: Figma
My role: UI/UX Designer
Problem Statement
Designing a planning app that would be universally beneficial to an audience of a highly individualized disorder was a daunting task. We broke down ADHD-caused executive dysfunctions and behavior to the most concrete and prevalent mental blocks to design an app that would be intensive yet flexible to an individual’s unique needs. As the primary designer and researcher, I was excited at the challenge of creating a product through empathizing with a unique user group.
User Interviews
To empathize and understand the neurodivergent mindset, I conducted user interviews on our target audience of young adults diagnosed with ADHD. This allowed us to gain qualitative information that was both attitudinal and behavioral. I gathered and organized the data into affinity maps.
Creating user stories is when the first function and flow ideas began to pop-up. I prioritized two traits to improve on: organization and focus. I started thinking of ways the app could improve on from these two areas.
Learnings and Retrospects
As the designer and researcher, I realized early on there were many blind spots in my ideation process due to being a small team. With a task designed around empathy, it was important to include a diverse range of perspectives, which was difficult to do under our limitations.
Designing an app that would be universally helpful to a varied group of people with unique needs I knew was going to be nearly impossible, but trying to find a balance of making something that would be appealing on a wide spectrum while also being tailored to an individual level was still an ambitious challenge. While the results from the usability tests were positive, I think there would have had to have been a larger sample size and more rounds of usability tests from improved prototypes to see if we were able to achieve that balance.
What’s Next?
At the end of the day, creating something that gives those who are at risk of falling behind a chance brings me an insurmountable sense of pride. With over 8 million adults in the United States affected by ADHD, and seeing my app helping people with not just with their daily schedules, but overcoming their disorder inspires me to create and help more.
Affinity Maps
From these interviews, a few struggles with productivity were common across the board:
Getting started on tasks was the hardest part
Tasks that required strong prioritization and organization skills were hard to accomplish in a timely manner
Hard to do tasks that the user wasn’t motivated to do
Having identified these problems, my next step was ideating functions that would lead into user stories, with the ends being the intended results.
User Stories
User Flows
I mapped out two red-route flows: managing tasks and doing a session. Task managing, aka To-Do list making, was designed to help with organization by allowing a simple way for users to understand and categorize their tasks. The Sessions function would help with focus by engaging users in a timed period of disabling access to the rest of their phone. Once the time was over, the user would review their progress and decide their next action.
Sketches
After establishing my task flows, I started sketching some ideation sketches of what the application could look like when translated digitally.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
I translated the completed sketches into wireframes. My goal during the wireframe process is to make the user interface easy to understand and intuitive because ease of use is a key selling point and appeal in the market of planning apps. Even if the user’s immediate intuition doesn’t comply with the app, my hope is that the app is designed simple enough that the user will quickly learn how to use it and will be compelled to use it more.
Testing
With the wireframes complete, I put it through a usability test, using five subjects. The results were great with only a few changes needing to be made to some design choices, with many users saying they would be interested in using an app like this for their daily lives.
Style Guide
I used tertiary colors, gradients and smooth shapes to combine the simple familiarity of planning apps with the serenity and warmth of meditation apps, conveying feelings of focus and clarity.
High Fidelity
Taking the feedback from the usability testing and the style guide I created, I made the adjustments and produced the high fidelity mockups and prototype.