Autism Speaks Community Portal

Team Workshop

In order to gain an understanding of their stakeholders and their needs, our team went to their headquarters in New York to conduct a three hour interactive workshop. This allowed us to dig deep and understand Autism Speaks key personas, needs, and wants prior to sketching solutions.

From Ideas to Concepts

Our iterative process moved from sketches, to wireframes, to designs, and interactive prototypes that allowed us to gather critical internal and external stakeholder feedback along the way to ensure the solution being built was solving key user needs.

A Personalized Experience

Autism Speaks’ online community platform offers each user a personalized experience. User information collected during registration is used to generate customized content and recommendations. This algorithm improves user engagement and helps Autism Speaks tailor content to meet the needs of their community.

Leveraging Machine Learning Recommendations

The platform incorporates a sophisticated machine learning algorithm, driving content recommendations through collaborative filtering. As the user navigates, likes, and saves content, the platform becomes “smarter” and recommends content and resources relevant to them.

React + Drupal

With Drupal powering Autism Speaks’ public facing site, we decided to build the portal on the same technology. However, with the level of interactivity required, Drupal would not be able to provide the level of performance required.

With this in mind, we leveraged React.js as part of the frontend experience. React is a modern javascript library leveraged by a number of the world’s best performing web applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.