Year
2026
Client
Vanguard
Services
Brand, website design, development
Live site
About
Living with ADHD and working in roles that required both design and product management made planning a daily struggle. I had to wear many hats, juggling competing priorities in tandem.
Via came from that personal problem and aims to help people with ADHD and entrepreneurs with busy, changing schedules manage their workload and utilise free time optimally.
3-5%
Adults have ADHD
81%
Struggled with planning & organisation
95%
Use some form of planning tool
80%
Felt their current planning tool was too complicated or unhelpful
To find out if this problem was unique to me, I carried out a survey with 200 responses alongside 10 in-depth interviews.
Core problems
Not knowing where to start
“Knowing where to start and what to prioritise is my struggle; choice paralysis is real”
Struggling to stay on track
“It’s easy to get distracted & forget what I was doing; sometimes I just have so many plans”
The first prototype focused on validating the fundamental concept and information architecture.
Users could add tasks, set priorities, and receive task suggestions on a calendar. The aim was to understand whether combining task management and schedule visualisation would provide a useful foundation.
User testing found that getting everything into the system was often the most demanding step. Users wanted this to be as easy as possible.
Seeing tasks represented as time helped people understand what was doable.
Handwriting helped people think clearly, but this was hard to track and easily forgotten.
The second iteration focused on capturing work with minimal effort. This was done through an AI ‘brain dump’. Users could dump their thoughts and AI would process this into tasks, events, and routines.
OCR, voice-to-text and multiple file formats were supported to allow multimodal capture.
Seeing tasks represented as time helped people manage time blindness. We implemented an automated scheduling algorithm. The algorithm considered workload, availability, priorities, and the user’s commitments to build a practical plan.
Google Calendar sync was integrated to allow the system to read commitments. When meetings moved, deadlines changed, or new tasks arrived, the schedule would be recalculated rather than forcing users to rearrange everything manually.
The final iteration focused on bringing everything into one space. We extended Via to support features such as notes, projects, and dependencies.
The objective was to reduce context switching and keep the information needed to plan and execute work together in one workspace.
Via evolved from a basic planner into an adaptive scheduling product through research, prototyping, and iterative design. Via’s central idea remained consistent throughout: help people move from intention to action with less friction, less uncertainty, and a plan that can adapt as life changes.
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