Designing Digital Productivity Support for Adults with ADHD: A User-Centered Study of Work and Study Barriers - From Survey Findings to an Interactive Prototype

Sammanfattning

Adults with ADHD and people who experience persistent focus and organizationdifficulties often encounter barriers in everyday work and study contexts. These barriers can include difficulty organizing tasks, maintaining attention, switching betweenactivities, remembering obligations, regulating emotion, and sustaining routines overtime. Although many productivity tools and ADHD-friendly applications alreadyexist, they often rely on assumptions that can be difficult for ADHD users to meet,such as stable planning ability, consistent routines, low setup effort, and positiveresponses to reminders or progress tracking.This thesis investigates how adults with ADHD or frequent focus and organizationdifficulties experience productivity-related barriers, how existing tools fail to meetthose needs, and how user research can inform a more targeted digital support tool.The project follows a user-centered design process that combines literature review,survey research, design synthesis, and interactive prototyping. A survey with 69 validresponses was used as the main empirical basis for deriving design requirements. Thefindings show that participants had already tried many productivity and support tools,but still experienced difficulties related to communication paralysis, hyperfocus anddifficulty switching, activation paralysis, emotional dysregulation, working memorygaps, sensory overload, and rejection sensitivity.The design response translates these findings into a focused prototype direction.The resulting concept explores support for messy thought capture, task breakdown,energy-aware planning, gentle feedback, mood and focus check-ins, and optional focuscompanionship. The prototype is not framed as a clinical intervention or a universalsolution to ADHD. Instead, it functions as a research-informed design artifact thatmakes a possible model of ADHD-friendly productivity support concrete enough forreflection and user testing. An exploratory evaluation with 15 participants suggestedthat the mood check-in and focus session flows were relatively easy to complete, whilethe task breakdown flow showed both strong perceived value and clearer usabilityproblems around discoverability and interaction clarity.