Clarifi is a desktop app that helps middle- and high-school students with ADHD focus better on academic work by helping them build effective study habits and providing them with a distraction-free digital environment.

By designing a parent-facing portal for Clarifi, our goal is to help parents better support children with ADHD in building effective study habits and improving academic performance.

How can Clarifi help parents of children with ADHD better support their child's learning journey?

Educators and parents are an integral part of a student’s learning and growth, and their support can be especially impactful for teens with ADHD. To provide a more effective homework tool, Clarifi is looking for a way to involve educators and parents in the student’s learning journey on the app. While defining project specs with developers, we decided to focus on the parent side of the application.

Research methods

Insights

Initial Ideas

1. Reinforcement

• Send in app XP points to student when they complete an achievement

• Send reminders before a student misses a study session

2. Gamification

• Students complete streaks with consecutive days of studying

• Show streak progress

• Parents can set new goals for students

3. Recommendations

• Parents see study recommendations on the home tab based off of student's study activity

• Parents can schedule study sessions accordingly

❌ Not feasible for timeline

4. Scheduling

• Schedule meetings directly with educators

• View upcoming meetings

❌ Not feasible for timeline

5. Study Activity Overview

• View focus minutes, sessions completed, and other statistics on study activity

• View completed assignments

Building on ideas

Star System

As a team, we talked about the ways we could integrate reinforcement and gamification to help parents become more involved in their children's learning journeys.

We thought of a star system where parents could assign a star to prioritize an assignment and earn progress in their streak.

Assignments Page

As part of our idea to give parents an overview of what their child's schoolwork, we decided to flesh out the assignments page and integrate it with the star system.

The key challenge was finding a way to effectively display completed, in progress, and missing assignments.

High-fi & Assignment page revision

Some of the main revisions we made were displaying missing assignments in red to condense the number of categories we needed and indicate information more concisely and adding a tab where parents would be able to view recent activity.

First Draft

Revision

In progress Assignments card

Recent activity card

Overview

This was the first time I worked on a UI/UX design project for a client, and I learned a lot from this experience. Here are a couple of my key takeaways:

Working with a client and developers

• Talk to developers early to learn about technical constraints within the timeline and scope of the project. (For example, we determined that the study recommendations idea would not be feasible within our timeline.)

• There's a limit to how much a design can grow when it's limited to one individual - sharing designs frequently and brainstorming with the team leads to better ideas and valuable feedback

Learning that design can be messy

Though we likely could have streamlined the design process better, working on a project for Clarifi allowed me to realize and embrace the messy, nonlinear nature of the design process.

Class Project

Client Project

Through all the revisions, user interviews, and back-and-forth between brainstorming, wireframes, and mockups, I learned that it was important to think more broadly during the ideation process, avoid being tied to a single idea, and present multiple designs in low-fi.