Corporate collaboration, Hardware
Ideation Meeting Support Tool for ADHD
Helping ADHD Participants Stay Focused & Share 59.3% More Ideas
Role
Team Project
Impact
Team Leadership & Direction
Product Sketching
Concept Design
Stakeholder Communication
UX Planning
System Interaction
Wireframe
User Interface
Design execution & Validation
Team Project
UXUI 디자이너 1명 영상디자이너 1명 제품 2명
(2024.06~2024.08)
59.3% Improvement in Idea-sharing rate
133% Improvement in Level of concentration
In collaboration with Electronics (BS Lab) through an industry-academia partnership.
Problem
In meetings, ADHD users struggle to stay focused and share ideas in sync
With rapid shifts and heavy stimulation, ADHD users struggle to keep up with the flow of ideation.
Problem
The meeting support tool helps them stay as focused as everyone else
Focusing on ADHD participants who struggle to maintain concentration due to topic drift, context loss, and lack of nonverbal cues, the goal is to design a collaborative interface where all participants can stay aligned and immersed at the same level of understanding.
Problem
Ideation meetings are extremely demanding for people with ADHD
Idea Generation Problem
Idea Overflow & Dissipation
They often come up with many ideas at once, but before organizing them, their thoughts move elsewhere, causing timing issues or ideas to vanish. The speed of losing ideas is faster than capturing them.
Idea Interpretation Problem
Pressure of Immediacy
Because speech and thought happen simultaneously and the meeting moves quickly, there is little room to pause, organize, or revisit ideas.
Complexity & Context Loss
With rapid topic shifts and no structural anchors, they easily lose context and experience heavy cognitive load trying to record, speak, and interpret all at once.
User Interview
Interviews to Identify Pain Points of ADHD users in Ideation Meetings
Goal:
Find out what challenges ADHD users face during ideation meetings.
Participants:
6 people with ADHD who have struggled to participate in meetings.
Method:
Mixed in-person and online interviews (40 minutes each).
Observed their note-taking habits to see how they recall ideas during meetings.
Idea Generation Questions
When too many ideas come up and it’s hard to organize them.
When a good idea comes but the timing to share it is missed.
Idea Interpretation Questions
When ideas are recorded or lost.
When it’s hard to recall what was discussed after the meeting.
When ideas are distorted or understood differently.
Tool & Environment Questions
When using tools like whiteboards or FigJam feels uncomfortable.
*Permission to use interviewee photos in this portfolio has been obtained.
ADHD Idea Generation Notes
Spontaneous notes taken to avoid forgetting sudden thoughts. Ideas are captured freely with words, shapes, or symbols, without structure.
*Notes taken by the participants.
ADHD Idea Interpretation Notes
Notes written to organize thoughts and plan next actions.
They include logical structure and priorities, with the intention to share with others.
*Notes taken by the participants.
Insight
Selecting the Most Critical Pain Points in Ideation for ADHD Users
3 points
Causes critical disruption to work after the meeting
2 points
Makes it hard to follow the meeting
1 point
Can be compensated for after the meeting
Affinity Diagram with Importance Scoring
Idea Generation
The meeting topics often scatter, and there’s no clear point to return to.
Frequent real-time idea shifts make it easy to lose the flow.
The meeting lacks
a defined structure.
Attention is distracted while searching for related materials.
Different speaking tempos among participants make it hard to stay focused.
Noise around the meeting room.
Idea Interpretation
Unable to remember the exact context, making it hard to work properly.
Hard to understand what I wrote myself.
Hard to stay focused when someone talks for too long.
Slow to get into focus at the start of the meeting.
Difficult to search through recorded content.
Summaries vary depending on who takes the notes.
# Idea Generation
Acting on another stimulus before the spontaneous idea is structured.
My ideas fade too fast to get back to.
# Idea Interpretation
?
Frequent topic changes break the flow, making it hard to regain context.
I often find myself thinking, “Wait, what are we talking about right now?”
Unstructured notes make it hard to reconstruct the discussion later.
I can’t recall the context, so it’s hard to work. Even notes don’t help.
How might we + Success Metrics
How can an ADHD team member share creative ideas effectively with the team
while staying focused and in sync with the flow of the meeting?
Engagement : Level of concentration
Task Success: Idea-sharing rate
Literature Research
Research on Cognitive Support Strategies for ADHD users in Ideation
Idea Generation
✏️
Light Doodling
Reduces distraction in dull or monotonous settings and improves memory recall.
Boggs, J. B., Cohen, J. L., & Marchand, G. C. (2017). The effects of doodling on recall ability. Psychological Thought, 10(1), 206–216. https://doi.org/10.5964/psyct.v10i1.217
Idea Interpretation
📊
Information Blocking
& Chunking
Helps restore context in long discussions by showing where each point came from.
Farooqui, A. A., Tamer Gezici, & Manly, T. (2023). Chunking of Control: An Unrecognized Aspect of Cognitive Resource Limits. Journal of Cognition, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/joc.275
⚒️
Structured Note Frame
Separates key points, details, and summaries into columns, making later interpretation and review easier.
Boyle, J. R., & Rivera, T. Z. (2012). Note-Taking Techniques for Students With Disabilities. Learning Disability Quarterly, 35(3), 131–143. https://doi.org/10.1177/0731948711435794
Limitations of Existing Solutions
Existing tools overwhelm ADHD users and make ideas hard to keep
FigJam
Generation
Interpretation
-
Too many objects, colors, and texts appear on one screen at once.
-
As pages pile up, structure breaks and past ideas get lost.
Personal laptop
Generation
Interpretation
-
Users must listen, think, and write at once, causing overload.
-
Text-heavy layouts make it hard to grasp flow or priorities at a glance.
Whiteboard
Generation
Interpretation
-
Spontaneous ideas fade quickly with no way to save them.
-
With only screenshots for storage, discussion flow can’t be tracked.
Personal notebook
Generation
Interpretation
-
Unstructured notes make later connection and expansion difficult.
-
Personal symbols or abbreviations become hard to decode over time.
Stakeholder Map
*Interview period: 2024.07.08~07.14, 10 users (Non-ADHD colleagues who frequently collaborate with ADHD users)
Idea Generation
ADHD user has great ideas in one-on-one talks, but in group meetings, they struggle to jump in and share them
Idea Interpretation
In meetings, when an ADHD team member asks to recall something, it breaks others’ concentration
non-ADHD
👩💻
Person with ADHD
🙎♀️
Time and energy loss is significant.
They have great ideas, but when I ask, “What was that again?” during the meeting, the flow breaks for a moment.
When I’m in a one-on-one conversation, ideas come easily, but in meetings,
I keep missing the timing to speak.
Have to ask about what they missed.
Need to re-explain things.
Form Factor Study
Using shared meeting room device and personal tablet together
improved focus by linking group discussions with individual note-taking.
Personal laptop
ADHD Focus↓
Collaboration↓
-
Cannot support multi-modal input
-
Limits visual context sharing
Tablet
ADHD Focus↑
Collaboration↓
+
Easy for writing or doodling
-
Still focused on personal view
-
Hard to share ideas with others in real time
ADHD Focus↓
Collaboration↑
Meeting room device
+
Good for syncing overall team flow
-
Limits individual note-taking and interaction
-
Hard to record or control personally
-
Ideas rely on personal effort, hindering participation
Tablet + Meeting room device
ADHD Focus↑
Collaboration↑
+
Shared devices help ADHD users focus.
+
Link meeting flow and personal notes.
+
Allow doodling to maintain focus
-
Setup may be more complex than a single device
Ideation + User Feedback
Problem
Idea Generation
Idea loss before structuring
Search: Real-time Tracking
+
Difficult to retrieve information one by one.
Real-time Organization
If ideas are summarized in real time, they won’t fade away.
Idea Merging
Idea Interpretation
Unstructured notes
Real-time Summarization
Feels tiring to keep reading long text.
Real-time Note-taking
+
Requires manually reading through everything.
Real-time Voice Blocking
I like that it’s visually well divided.
Idea Interpretation
Difficulty restoring context
Timeline
+
Hard to recall what was discussed at different times.
Trigger Sentence Recognition Bookmark
Feedback Recognition Bookmark
It’s nice that only the key points remain when reviewing later.
Concept
Synchronizing diverse attention spans through real-time ideation support tools
Idea Generation
Real-time Idea Organization
Helps prevent ideas from fading by organizing keywords, connecting thoughts, and temporarily saving topics.
Save Idea
Follow-up Ideas
Increase brand affinity
Demographic insight
Meme potential
Idea Generation
Idea Merging
Not only organizes your own ideas but also improves overall meeting efficiency through shared understanding.
+
=
+
non-ADHD
ADHD User
Meeting AI Agent
Idea Interpretation
Real-time Note-taking & Voice Blocking
Automatically organizes live audio into idea blocks, helping maintain flow and easily restore context.
A
C
B
Idea Interpretation
Auto Bookmark via Emoji or Voice Recognition
Automatically bookmarks trigger sentences. Marks visual inputs from teammates (drawings, keywords) during earlier ideation.
Hot Topic
Important
Need to discuss again
Industrial Design Iteration
Developing a shared whiteboard that supports user-centered ideation through adaptive layouts
Step 1
Frequent actions during idea generation broke focus,
showing the need for a hands-free setup.
Sliding expandable type
Opens to the sides
Step 2
Working within a single view limited clarity & made the experience dull.
Step 3
Changing between landscape & portrait views adjusted the information density & layout, enabling participants to ideate in their preferred way.
Idea Generation
Idea Interpretation
Impact & Result
Task Success: Idea-sharing rate
59.3% Improvement in Idea-sharing rate
Q. How often did you feel confident to share your ideas during the meeting?
8 ADHD participants
Before
2.7/5
After
4.3/5
Engagement : Level of concentration
133% Improvement in Level of concentration
Q. Please indicate (e.g., by raising your hand) when you start to lose focus,
so that we can measure your sustained attention time.
8 ADHD participants
Before
6min
After
14min
“If this gets adopted, it could really change how productive people with ADHD are in meetings.Since ideas don’t slip away anymore, it’s much easier to stay immersed and focused on the work.”
“I used to feel self-conscious about doodling just to stay focused, but using this together actually seems to make our meetings more efficient. I like that it’s not just for me, it helps the whole team.”
Accessibility
Accessibility as a way to amplify user strengths
Mentor Feedback
Recognized for balancing creativity & usability in team leadership
Yunjin demonstrated strong leadership in guiding the team to make thoughtful, user-centered decisions throughout the project. The final product reflected a deep understanding of user needs and was designed with scalability and real-world application in mind. I was particularly impressed by how she balanced creativity with usability, the result was a solution ready for immediate implementation.
* Mentor. Han : Chief Product Designer, LG Electronics
What I’ve Learned
Designed for ADHD Users, Evolved into a Universal UX Improvement
Although the design began with the goal of addressing the concentration challenges faced by ADHD users, the resulting features ultimately provided meaningful value to all meeting participants.
By creating return points that prevent loss of flow, reducing interpretive gaps through visual comparison, and enabling easy context recovery through real-time block structuring, these functions proved to be not just specialized solutions for ADHD users but universal UX improvements that enhance overall meeting efficiency. This demonstrates that deeply exploring the discomforts of a specific target group can lead to the most fundamental advancements in user experience.
Accessibility can amplify a user’s strengths
I realized that true accessibility is not about compensating for limitations but about amplifying users’ strengths. For ADHD users, spontaneity and visual thinking are not distractions but sources of creative potential. This led me to propose a new hardware form that could instantly visualize spontaneous thoughts and respond to their unique rhythm of thinking.
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