JWD
Client Portal

Running a freelance web dev studio across three separate platforms meant three separate systems to maintain, and for an AuDHD brain, three separate places to lose track of things. Notion and ClickUp both demanded structure be imposed up front, before a project had shown what structure it actually needed. Clients had to learn tools they'd never use again for a single job. Emails got buried in spam, deadlines slipped through the gap between platforms, and projects dragged on for reasons that had nothing to do with the work itself.

There was no separate research phase, because the research had already happened, just not for this project. Years of lived experience as AuDHD sat alongside existing evidence: adults with ADHD show measurably lower dopamine receptor and transporter levels in the brain regions that drive motivation and reward processing, which is part of why a distant, undifferentiated task list rarely gets opened, let alone finished. The reward system responds far better to something immediate and visible than to a single outcome sitting weeks away, which is what pointed toward stats and progress markers sitting at the top of the interface rather than buried in it.

PDA needed separate handling from that. PDA is an anxiety-driven need to stay in control and avoid other people's demands and expectations, where control is what keeps the anxiety manageable, so anything in the interface that reads as an instruction risks the same shutdown a verbal demand would trigger, however well-intentioned the nudge. That ruled out due-date banners, red badges and progress bars styled as pressure, and pointed toward colour and iconography that inform rather than instruct.

That reframed the brief. The question wasn't "which project management tool fits my workflow", it was "what does an interface have to do to stop me avoiding it". Designing with the AuDHD rather than around it meant building the information architecture around moments of need, rather than around database objects, which is the opposite of how Notion and ClickUp are structured.

Every screen decision was tested against the same standard: does this reduce the gap between wanting to check on a project and actually checking. If a piece of information couldn't justify its presence against that standard, it didn't make the screen.

Clients are invited manually, project by project, there's no self-serve signup to get wrong. Access is role-based once in: a client sees their own project in full, but anything not relevant to them is hidden by default rather than exposed and roped off, which keeps the interface calm for them in the same way it's calm for me. When a project ends, its data is archived rather than deleted immediately, and cleared after two years.