Tidy* - Your Second Brain

Designing for Neurodivergence is Designing for Everyone - Our Inspirations

For the past two to three decades, society and its attitude towards neurodivergence has drastically shifted. What was once shunned is now encouraged to talk about, what was once left unattended is now witnessing rapid advancements in treatments. Through studies, trials, and anecdotes, neurodivergence has been increasingly validated and acknowledged in the western hemisphere of the world. However, it's not perfect - unfortunately the neurodivergent are still a ways away from being widely considered "normal". We are not the target audience for many forms of mass media, so it's typically our responsibility to overcome and adapt.

That's where we step in. Our team wanted to target those with ADHD by creating an app to assist attention impaired college students - an app whose feature set is centred around unorthodox, yet simple functions that are highly compatible with the neurotypical and especially the neurodivergent. We took inspiration from notion, however our app is a much more concise and minimalist approach to self management. We are no stranger to the many struggles that the attention deficit face - lack of motivation, disorganization, and a disdain for focused goals. Tidy is a solution to these issues, at least in an academic capacity. It provides users with an intuitive yet robust user experience, whilst providing functions that actively helps fight against the struggles noted above.

We just wanna make the world more accessible :)

What it does

Tidy, like its subtitle says, is supposed to act as a second brain to assist you in your day to day. Equipped with a daily log/journal with speech-to-text transcription, a responsive scheduling system, a robust to-do list, and a study timer that encourage the user to stay on task while also allowing themselves a break. Each feature is further detailed below:

• Daily Journal: Tidy will asks the users three questions surrounding themes of gratitude, achievement, and self-reflection. This is meant to encourage the user to approach their day with focus and transparency, kickstarted by a positive mindset. The journal entries are then logged for future reference, with the idea being that not every day might be a good day, so reminding oneself of better days will ground them. Furthermore, Tidy's daily journal supports speech-to-text transcription to provide further accessibility to users who may prefer to speak their responses.

• Schedule: Keeping track of ones lectures, due dates, and events are pivotal to any successful college experience. Our responsive scheduling system allows users to achieve such organization through the use of a simple event logging function. Tidy then displays those events in a weekly calendar focused on simple yet effective visual markers of which event is which and when said event is. The user can then choose to opt into receiving notifications to their phone, powered by Twilio, with the intent to remind them of when the event is occurring

• To-do List: Not everything needs to necessarily be dumped into a calendar - sometimes you need a list to dump the tasks that are flying around in your brain. Our to-do list is a simple yet noteworthy task tracker that allows users to divide the mental load of keeping miscellaneous tasks in mind into a tangible list. For the more important tasks, they can be assigned a higher priority and the user may also receive notifications to remind them of those important tasks. These tasks stay active until marked as completed, and users can then see the tasks they completed scratched off the list, invoking a sense of achievement.

• Study Timer: The pomodoro technique is a well-known college hack that has been a hallmark in studying efficiently. Users can set the length of time they want to work for, and associate that timer with an event for the sake of easier task management. The advantage to using our study timer vs. others is that we tried to make it pretty c:

How we built it

Well firstly, a number of virgin sacrifices were required. Then, through the integration of AlanAI and Twilio, we were able to achieve some handy features for our journal, schedule, and to-do list. As for the presentation and development of the app, prototyping was primarily done with Figma, with vector icons that were both homemade and sourced from nounproject. The website and its functions were developed in HTML, CSS, and Javascript (the golden standard).

Challenges we ran into

We put a lot of time and effort into the ideation and prototyping of the project, so translating it into a functional application proved to be quite the challenge. We're all rather novice to web design languages, so tackling the integrations of APIs such as AlanAI and Twilio initially proved to be quite the barrier. However, with extensive research and a bit of perseverance (maybe a sob here or there), we were able to understand the basics of the API.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to fully implement either feature set, but I'd be damned if I didn't say we didn't try. Furthermore, due to time constraints, and a couple of other issues, we weren't able to style the website in away that reflected the design of our prototype.

Shout out to the developers of both AlanAI and Twilio for providing such a robust toolset that is relatively accessible to even novice developers!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our aesthetic direction and presentation felt increasingly more welcoming with each iteration of the design, thereby furthering our confidence in our product. We are very proud of ourselves for putting in our best efforts to translate our functions into code given that we aren't the most intermediate of coders. Also, keeping each other accountable and looking out for one another really brought out some unexpected product management capabilities. Due to this, our team all agreed that this hackathon went miles better than our first hackathons.

What we learned

We learned about how to further control and refine our ambitions with relative respect to our strengths and weaknesses. Rather than waiting for one person to finish one task before another moves on to the next, we took a puzzle piece approach where we all developed and design multiple parts independently while being able to maintain cohesion through each piece.

What's next for Tidy - Your Second Brain

Tidy definitely has much more space for improvement - further expanding the feature sets while maintaining our accessible user experience seems to be the most commonly agreed upon next step for our little brainchild. As individuals who struggle with ADHD, we kept iterating the product until we believed that we would use it to counter our own struggles, so mayhap it will see some use by the team in the future :)

Built With

• adobe-illustrator
• alanai
• css
• figma
• html
• javascript
• twilio