Chatwave was a project I worked on as part of a 3rd year design course. This project was intended to develop our UX research skills as well as our capabilities with interface design. The goal was to develop an interface to present a solution.
ChatWave was a five-week project in which we were tasked with designing for a specific domain space. Our group chose to focus on cognitive disabilities, specifically ADHD. Through extensive UX research, we developed an interface designed specifically to address the needs of people within our chosen domain. ChatWave is a message compiler system that integrates many of a users messaging and email apps into one interface, making the process of reading, responding, and finding messages and emails simpler.
User Research
Prototyping
Visual Design
Figma
Baseer Joya
Gabriel Bastos
Keith Law
The first stage of the process was researching our domain space. Focusing specifically on ADHD users, my task was to indentify potential issues they face when using interfaces and then assist in developing a viable solution for such a problem.
“I’ll make notes, underlines & bookmarks and it’ll still take me a lot of time to find a specific passage.”
- Anonymous Interviewee
As part of the research phase, I was responsible for conducting interviews and surveys of ADHD users as well as gathering articles and other materials to formulate an understanding. In that research, we found two key issues that ADHD users faced.
ADHD users experience difficulty with memory, frequent reminders, and effective methods to retrieve forgotten information.
ADHD users have difficulty maintaining focus and blocking out distractions, which can be exacerbated by interfaces that struggle to accommodate them.
After compiling the research, the team identified a design opportunity in the form of a messaging app to assist in managing information retrieval for ADHD users.
With our idea finalized, the challenge was focusing our attention on the user and making sure our solution centered around user needs. This included limiting the struggle with information retrieval and avoiding the cognitive overload for our users. We were able to achieve this by building our interface around 3 core features.
To ADHD users, constant notifications can promote anxiety, but at the same time, ignoring them causes users to forget replying, which leads to ghosting.
With time-based notifications, users can set specific periods to read messages rather than have them scattered throughout the day, thus avoiding both distractions and preventing forgetfulness.
To help ADHD users further manage and organize information, we proposed a feature that assigns labels to contacts: school, work, family, and social.
Among the insights was that ADHD users can sometimes get lost in a sea of information and lose track of where they were. To address this, I proposed a curated sorting system to ease this issue for the user. The sorting works in 4 forms: Priority, platform sorting, and category sorting which works with our labelling system.
This project was an important lesson in UX research. In this project I was able to strengthen my skills by interviewing participants, reviewing the information provided and highlight key insights from the research that allowed us to carry our project forward.
The process of developing user centric designs and prioritizing that over a fancy design was integral in developing my skills as a designer.
Teamwork and collaboration is an important part of being a designer and working in a team of 3 taught me to trust my partners even if at times I personally might not have agreed with the decision taken.