Designing for ADHD to Improve Your Home Life

Brett Abraham -

I recently watched this video from my favorite ADHD YouTube Channel. It's all about "home hacks" to make your home more ADHD friendly.

The main thing this reminded me of: "home hacks for ADHD" are just good UX design principles.

I take time in my own home to try to employ good UX design, in large part because I have ADHD. Good interior designers will do the same. You start with "How is this space used?" and go from there.

But here's the biggest thing this video discussed: if a design works for someone with ADHD, it’s well on its way to being great for everyone.

Point of Performance

Let's use "point of performance" as an example. "Point of performance" is the practice of making everything to complete a task immediately accessible, ideally within arm's reach. It’s a common practice in business, one I saw constantly at my first real job at Dunkin' Donuts.

It's a much less common practice at home. At home, it's not uncommon to see this layout:

  1. Grab the coffee from the pantry.
  2. Bring the coffee to the coffee maker.
  3. Bring the coffee reservoir to the sink and fill it up.
  4. Bring it back to start the coffee maker.
  5. Walk across the room to grab a mug.

For a neurotypical person, this is just an inconvenience. A minor inconvenience perhaps, but an inconvenience nevertheless.

But for someone with ADHD, each of these steps is a opportunity for that person to get distracted and start a completely different task.

If you design a space for those with ADHD and with Point of Performance in mind, you've made the space much more accessible for them. And crucially, you've also reduced the frictions that everyone else experiences as well.

Accessible Design is Actually just Good Design

When we approach design from an accessible perspective, we often end up with solutions that benefit everyone. Finding and alleviating the major challenges that small groups face benefit the rest of the population by reducing the minor frictions in their day to day life.

In the video, they also discuss labelling containers in their pantry. Very helpful for those with ADHD, but also very helpful for many other reasons:

  • Children can easily find what they're looking for.
  • Grocery lists are easy to make — just look at the the empty bins!
  • Caretakers, family members, and other first-time vistors can easily find what they're looking for.

That last point is really important: designing for ADHD provides great benefits to inexperienced users.

Ultimately, good UX design is all about reducing cognitive load, creating helpful mindless choices, and making life easier. Good interior design takes all that into account.

So next time you try to do a task at home, think about how you could design your space for someone who gets easily distracted. You might find that you could make a massive improvement!