A users with ADHD can flag areas of friction for everyone that might otherwise go unobserved
7 million (11.4%) U.S. children aged 3–17 years have ever been diagnosed with ADHD,
If you can get users who struggle with focus to onboard and sustain interest in your product, just think what you can do for everyone else.
Designing for users with ADHD
- In clear terms and their own language, ask the user upfront what their goal is. To give them a focused experience, it’s vital that you know what they are looking for. This is also a great opportunity to build your product strategy by getting data on which choice users prefer. You’ll find some great examples of this in fitness and wellbeing apps.
- Help the user stick to this goal — be disciplined about reducing options. Give them one thing to handle at a time. Use pagination rather than infinite scroll. Offer upsell options only when you’re sure central tasks have been completed.
- Include users with ADHD in your research processes. If possible, observe in context — it’s one thing to complete a task in a dedicated session; another when you have a million other distractions to hyperfocus on. Also, probably best to avoid diary studies. They are not likely to be completed 🙂
- Reduce anxiety. In particular, avoid urgency signalling (“last chance” messaging, overuse of notifications, etc.). The Humane Design Guide has some great examples of how to do this.
- Give encouragement. Use rewarding elements like a checklist or a progress bar to show users visually how they are on track to reaching their goal.
- Don’t ask users to remember important information across platforms. This strains short-term memory. Allow users to log in with existing services (Google, Apple…). Provide a record of anything important in context (i.e. inside your product).
