Background: Shimmer’s ADHD Coaching System
Shimmer was born from my personal frustration when I was diagnosed last year & wasn’t able to find an affordable, quality ADHD coach. True hyperfocus mode, I joined up with the top ADHD experts, the ADHD community, and an incredible team to build the first Affordable ADHD Coaching Platform, built by and for people with ADHD.
This last year has been a whirlwind of an adventure to say the least. Since then, we’ve built an incredible ADHD community of 60K+, onboarded 20+ coaches, launched our ADHD Coaching Programme, and served over 1,000 members through it.
A bit on how Shimmer works:
- The science:
- ~Shimmer’s program is rooted in Health & Wellness Coaching and closely linked to it's sister discipline of positive psychology
- ~Your coach will help you focus on your horizons and the opportunities ahead, and not solely on diagnostics and deficits. You’ll work together to build skills, develop awareness, and institute habits and routines that work for your life
- The day-to-day:
- ~Get matched w/ an expert ADHD coach, meet weekly
- ~Set goals & experiment with skills, strategies, and routines each week
- ~Stay accountable to progress, learning and growing through the Shimmer platform
The Why: Driving Force Behind the Web Platform
Contrary to the prevailing notion of pushing mobile usage and competing for attention, our core purpose has always centered around addressing the unique needs of people with ADHD and prioritizing coaching outcomes. So we ask ourselves the question: What are the key obstacles or voids preventing our members from fully realizing their coaching goals? We then reverse-engineer solutions from these challenges. Here are a few primary hurdles we tackled and how the web platform elegantly resolves them:
🙈 Out of Sight, Out of Mind
For those of us with ADHD, when things are not in our view or realm of attention, it’s very difficult to retrieve this information. Our members, predominantly spending their time on laptops, often find that Goals, Actions, and even their Coach fade into the background until they later pick up their phones.
The new mobile-web system introduces diverse entry points, empowering users to engage with their coaching journey across an array of devices, extending beyond the confines of smartphones.
🤿 Desire to Go Deeper
Shimmer is a lot more than an app, it’s a holistic Coaching Experience that requires deep thought and reflection. Our members have been itching for the web app to be able to better engage in the in-app Experiences that require a deeper level of thinking, typing, and consuming information.
The web platform is purposefully crafted to enable deep exploration. Not only does it offer expanded typing space for introspection and the convenience of keyboard input, but it also enhances the capability to bookmark and retrieve relevant insights.
🧠 Forgetting Coaching Goals & Insights
Members often walk away with “a-ha” moments, especially after initially setting holistic goals for their ADHD Coaching Journey. Unfortunately these are sometimes lost either on the way from their laptop to their phone, or simply because it was not displayed in the right way at the right time.
The web platform provides a visual cue for Coaching Goals, maintaining their prominent position to sustain motivation. Furthermore, coaching insights can now be easily captured within pre- and post-session workflows.
📱 Phone Addiction
Many of our members either struggle with phone addiction, or are simply looking to reduce their use of their phone. Several members have their main goal as reducing phone time. For these members, knowing they need to go to their phone to work on their ADHD goals can cause distraction: e.g. checking their Shimmer app but ending up on Instagram.
The web-based platform offers a focused environment for engagement, minimizing the potential distractions often associated with mobile apps.
The How: An Iterative Community Effort
If you’ve touched even just an edge of the Shimmer Orbit, you’ve likely noticed we’re absolutely obsessed with building with the community. Every single day, the team holds lively feedback calls with members, coaches, ADHD creators, and ADHD experts.
Here is a look into a few key components of our web design process. We’re happy to elaborate if you message us! We’ve…
- Held hundreds of 1:1 interviews with potential members, current members, cancelled members
- Ran focus groups and “CTO open houses”
- Implemented a direct chat line through the app to our CTO
- Ran an extremely iterative 360 UX design: interviewing coaches, members
- Pressure tested our Web App & design with the wider ADHD community including ADHD creators
- …And the table-stakes testing phases with members (Alpha, Beta…)
The What: Web App Unveiled
🎨 Design Guidelines
Getting to design for people with ADHD is a privilege and a brain teaser all at once—most products built for neurotypical audiences don’t have as strong of a focus on accessibility, but for us it’s one of the most rewarding things to think about and get right. Here are our 3 guiding design philosophies:
- Accessibility is a prerequisite: visual coherence, sans-serif typography, thoughtfully spaced elements, and appropriately sized fonts.
- However, stimulation is necessary: careful use of visual elements like color, images, movement (and confetti)
- All flows are ADHD-elevated: For example, making sure multi-step forms where previous steps need to be referenced are properly shown. Another one is the inclusion of examples for key questions from other members to reduce cognitive load and decision making paralysis.
🌐 The Web App!
If you’re still reading, kudos—we hope you’re as invested and excited as we are now! If you skipped and scrolled right to here, we see you 👀.
Each flow has been carefully thought out, tested, and designed to elevate the ADHD coaching experience. Check it out:
1. Onboarding: Sit down and get comfy. You’ll start off by setting your long-term vision and assess your starting state, setting the foundation for your coaching goals.
2. Setting your first goal: The new goal setting wizard allows you to solidify the importance of your goal, link actions, and print it to keep it on your desk!
3. Completing actions, reflecting, and celebrating: Experiment with weekly actions with your coach, reflect on what’s working (or not!), and celebrate your wins.
4. Coach support: Between sessions, your coach will be notified of your progress and cheer you on! You can also ping your coach for troubleshooting or advanced learning resources.
5. Continued learning: Embark on bite-sized learning modules on key ADHD topics or access resources assigned by your coach.
Curious to learn more? Take a deeper look into our Web App on our Product Hunt launch (we’d appreciate the support!) or by signing up for a coach at app.shimmer.care.
The Future: A World Where Difference is Our Strength
I can no longer count the amount of times I sat on my floor and cried after hearing mind-boggling, heart-warming, awe-inspiring success stories from our incredible members. Promotions to positions they never thought they’d achieve, mending and strengthening of close-to-breaking relationships, the first feeling of pride as a parent in years, and thriving in new, purposeful jobs… the list goes on.
What this shows me (what I already knew in my heart), is that people with ADHD have an immense amount of talent, intelligence, creativity, beauty, and love to contribute to the world that is often being blocked or held down.
What this also screams to me is the need farther reaching accommodations, support, and understanding from the wider community to help unleash the strengths of difference. Employers, family members, partners, teachers, friends—this is an invitation to join us in our mission, because “When we shape the world for difference, we all thrive. (Understood.org)”.
With love,
Chris Wang + The entire Shimmer team
