Now that I had decided on the idea I wanted to take forward as my major project, I needed to move on to the next stage: validating that the idea would solve a problem for people. Once completed, I could develop a pitch to present to my lecturers, illustrating my idea, the problem it would solve (with supporting research findings), and a timeframe that would allow me to complete the work in time for submission in May.
I had developed my initial idea based on my personal experience of the Adult Autism Diagnosis process, which had highlighted several areas where the service could be improved by utilising the latest digital technology alongside professional expertise. However, I now needed to dig deeper into the current service to fully understand the current situation and how I could maximise the impact of my design.
Firstly, I wanted to start my pitch by giving an overview of Autism in adults, what it means and its prevalence. This was to set the scene for my audience and illustrate why what I was doing was important. I was able to find a large amount of academic research that covered the prevalence of autism in adults, as well as some of the issues in adults. These included a huge rate of adults with autism not being diagnosed, as well as clear gender bias where women were significantly less likely to receive a diagnosis than men. These are issues I hope to address with my new service design. Some of my sources were
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/what-is-autism
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(23)00045-5/fulltext
https://autismni.org/help-support/support-for-autistic-adults/adult-diagnosis
A key piece of information I hoped to include was the current waiting time for an Adult Autism Assessment, as a major driver for my design would be to design a service that would reduce how long people had to wait between seeking an assessment and receiving a result. This is vital as without a diagnosis, people can be left in limbo and not access the support they need. I started by searching online, and while I found information on waiting lists for many services offered through health trusts, there was no information on Adult Autism Services in Northern Ireland. I extended my search to look at waiting times in England; this information was also not publicly available. The best information I could find was that 89% of people seeking a diagnosis were waiting longer than the NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) guidelines said they should which was 13 weeks. This illustrates the scale of the issue, I know for me the wait was in excess of 12 months, and by all accounts, it has gotten worse since then. Through my extensive search, however, I did find a question raised at Stormont where an MLA had asked the Minister for Health how they intended to address the lengthy waiting times for Adult Autism assessments (https://aims.niassembly.gov.uk/questions/printquestionsummary.aspx?docid=392329). This showed the levels of understaffing across all health trusts and that waiting times were a big enough concern to be raised in Parliament, validating the need for an intervention that could help reduce waiting times.
To frame the problem adults seeking an autism diagnosis face, I wanted to cover in detail the current process they must go through and the numerous pain points they face along the way. Autism charities, such as the National Autistic Society and Autism NI, provide articles on their websites that explain the assessment process. This, along with my personal experience, allowed me to map out the process visually. I was also able to find statistics from a survey completed by the NAS that showed that 80% of adults seeking a diagnosis struggled through the process, with GPs’ lack of understanding being a common issue.
I also read significant amounts of academic research and chatted with friends who have experienced seeking an Autism Diagnosis as adults, and all of this validated that there are significant issues with the current service that I could look to design a solution to.
The next stage for me was to map out my idea and design a presentation to show how it could tackle the issues I had uncovered. I had a clear idea of the areas of the service I wanted to tackle and where technology could improve, so I mapped these out on Miro before developing my slide deck.
I included a brief overview of Autism in adults, key parts of the validation research I had completed, my vision for the project, the stages I would need to complete the project, as well as a Gantt Chart showing my proposed timeline. I also included some infographics and quotes from autistic people about their diagnostic experiences within the slides.
For the design of my slide deck, I decided to keep things simple. I didn’t have a clear brand for the project at this stage, and I knew that I would want to spend time during the project on brand design. I therefore decided to use typography, colours and a logo that I could revisit and change if needed.
I created a basic jigsaw puzzle piece logo, as the puzzle piece is the most widely recognised symbol worldwide for Autism. I used coolors.co to develop my colour palette, which you can see below and used two Google Fonts, PT Sans for my statistics and Signika for all my other text. I selected a muted colour palette as I wanted to keep the presentation focused on the information I was providing rather than distracting my audience with lots of bright colours. I used two accent colours to allow me to draw additional attention to key parts of my presentation and overall, was very happy with the visual style of my presentation.
Below is a link to my Pitch Slide Deck.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rk_MbqNSoTw-huB-rYuZExwUP7DQHcxM7nK17tTNZEI/edit?usp=sharing