As part of the research phase of my major project, I need to gather information from a wide range of people to help shape my idea and designs. The best way for me to gather data is to create a survey to gain quantitative and some qualitative data. I can then share this survey with suitable people, and once I have completed surveys, I can collate and analyse the data to discover insights that will help me to create the best design possible.
My first task was to find suitable participants to complete my survey. Early on, I realised I would need to create two surveys: one for professionals who work with autistic people in some capacity and one for autistic people themselves. I would therefore need to find two cohorts of individuals willing to take my surveys.
My first step was to reach out to my network to see if they could help, either directly or by providing details of people they knew who could help. This yielded great results as I got several additional people willing to take part through my initial contacts.
My next step was to look at organisations that work within the autism and neurodiversity space, who have staff or people they support who may be willing to complete my survey. I decided to limit my search to local organisations based within Northern Ireland to ensure any information was as relevant as possible. I created a table with all of the people I was going to contact so I could keep track of responses over time.
I could now reach out to these organisations and see if they could help.
Now that I had the contact details I needed, I could move on to crafting a suitable email to send to them to request support. I started on Miro simply writing what I wanted to say and gradually refining my words until I was happy with the result. Below you can see my initial drafts:
Now that I had found people who could fill in my surveys, it was time to craft the questions to get the information I needed. From looking online at information around autism for my pitch presentation, I found this website https://autisticnotweird.com/autismsurvey/ that contained a survey that asked several general questions around autism. With 11,212 respondents, more than I could ever hope to reach, this removed the need for me to ask any of these questions, allowing me to make my survey much more specific to the questions I needed to answer.
I decided I needed to create two surveys, one for autistic/neurodivergent people themselves and another for professionals who either conducted autism assessments or supported autistic people. This would allow me to ask questions that would only apply to one of the groups and to tailor the language of some questions to the needs of the target respondents.
I started by looking at the data I wanted to gather and came up with four main categories of questions: general information, their experience and suggested improvements for the current autism diagnostic process, some information on their use of technology and AI and finally how they felt about using AI as part of a future adult autism diagnostic service. From this, I was able to draft an initial set of questions on Miro, which you can see below.
This planning showed that I needed to be able to ask questions and, depending on the respondent’s answer, route them to the next relevant question. I knew I could do this using Google Forms, which was my choice of tool to create these surveys. As a survey tool, it makes it easy to share the survey using a URL link and presents the collected data in a way which makes analysing the data very easy.
I now migrated the questions I had come up with into Google Forms and have a first draft of my survey. However, I wasn’t happy that all the questions were worded as well as they could be, so I decided to use AI to help me improve them and ensure I wasn’t including any unintentional biases.
I used the prompt: