iOS Mobile App Case Study

Today is an iOS mobile app designed to support young adults with ADHD complete self care tasks in their day by restricting access to addictive apps and redirecting their attention to incomplete self care tasks.

User Research - I conducted desk research on adult ADHD symptoms, collaborated on survey design and respondent recruitment strategy, then personally scripted and conducted 5 user interviews over zoom.

Problem Solving - For the feature explored in this case study, I synthesized the key problem from research insights, conducted a competitive analysis of current solutions, then iteratively developed a solution mechanism.

Design System - I was also responsible for the development of the app's design system and documentation maintenance.

Myself, Designer Madison Hatch, Designer ‍Jaye Sloat, Designer

Figma, FigJam, Google Suite, Zoom

4 Weeks + 1 Week Solo Sprint

During the IterateUX Design-a-thon, two other designers and I followed a design-thinking approach to research and design a multi-featured task tracking app specifically for young adults with ADHD. Following the 4 week event, I wanted to dig deeper into the user journey of a specific feature. The below case study is comprised of our team research and my individual 1 week feature exploration.

Our group members had personal connections to young adults with ADHD, so we each performed foundational research to check our assumptions. Our key learnings were that our user base...

Struggled with time management & prioritization

Struggled with task follow-through

Motivated by urgency

Informed by our foundational research, we developed a survey to quickly and easily identify users' key problems, current management strategies and their effectiveness.

75%

Struggled with Personal Hygiene

88%

Struggled with Chores

We learned users had strategies in place to manage work and school related responsibilities, but no strategies for completing personal care tasks such as showering, cooking meals, or cleaning.

These results gave us a very clear picture of who our targeted user was, so we developed a persona to build team alignment and have a reference for later stages of the project.

I still wanted to get a deeper understanding of the emotions and thought patterns our user base experienced around completing these self care tasks, so I conducted 5 Zoom interviews with young adults between ages 18 and 26 to ask about these habits.

During the interviews, one story was told again and again:

"I wake up and instinctually reach for my phone, get sucked into scrolling until I've run out of time to do anything except run out the door to work."

It was very clear this was a narrative all users shared and one that elicited extremely negative emotions and self talk, making it the urgent focus of my feature development.

I knew to effectively address this problem, I needed to understand each step the user takes and the emotions at each step in order to explore opportunities for changing this user journey outcome.

Journey Mapping of Phone Scrolling in the Morning

How might we stop users from endlessly scrolling and refocus their attention on self care tasks?

Blurred competitor icons

Yes. Kind of. There were many apps on the market providing features to remind users to take breaks from addictive apps and others that blocked users out from apps altogether, but none of these addressed our core problem.

Push notifications introduce friction to the user journey, but ultimately won't change the outcome of user behavior. Young adults with ADHD are motivated by urgency and novelty, neither of which are created by push notifications.

This was effective (and one of our user bases' current strategies) for staying off addictive apps during the workday or completing homework, but wasn't helping anyone complete self care tasks.

What if I bound app restriction specifically to tasks and redirected users' attention to their incomplete self care tasks, and even better, once their self care tasks are complete, they can regain access.

Diagram of new proposed mechanism

This solution leverages the app blocking mechanism promoted by competitors, but includes a novel feature designed specifically for young adults with ADHD to capture and redirect attention.

Before drafting screens, I wanted to flush out how the mechanism would work. This would inform what information needed to be available to the user on screen, and what design patterns would be best to implement the mechanism.

User Flow Diagram of Proposed Mechanism

Onboarding: Selecting Task Group

When users onboard, they're given pre-grouped self care tasks to reduce the effort of task creation and create a low-barrier to entry. This was important to our team because we learned from our research that when young adults with ADHD are faced with multi-step, high cognitive input tasks, they were less likely to complete them.

Onboarding: Establishing Time Frame

Additionally, subtasks are pre-assigned an estimated time for completion. This is important to the block out mechanism, but also helps our user group better grasp how long tasks will take and improve time management. If our estimations for tasks are wrong, users can of course change them later in the settings.

Onboarding: Selecting Tasks

Nobody wants reminders to brush their teeth when they should be making dinner - that makes no sense!

When a user opens a restricted app within a time frame that they have incomplete self care tasks, they're blocked. This interrupts their habit and creates opportunity for establishing a different behavior.

Interruption Sequence

Instead of just blocking the users from restricted apps (common competitors' mechanism), the user is redirected to their next incomplete task (novel!).

Specifically designed for people with ADHD to guide their attention to incomplete tasks.

Redirection Sequence

Depending on how long a user takes to mark their tasks as complete, they will see one of two screens when navigating back to their restricted app.

Routine Completion Happy Path

Routine Completion Unhappy Path

Building a style guide and components is not enough. Written guidelines for usage or a meeting on how the design system should be used would have helped us maintain more consistency when collaborating as a team.

More advanced (and delightful) prototyping

iOS Mobile Design Patterns

In an ideal world, I'd love to assess app engagement rates, and deploy a lightweight satisfaction survey to users to establish a baseline of success, then follow with more data collection and testing from there.

This app was designed with WCAG guidelines in mind, but it would be beneficial to do a more thorough assessment to ensure all users can have an equitable experience using the app.