My team was tasked with finding a web-based solution so that donors could more easily find when and where they can donate blood. Getting enough donors is hard enough and we wanted to remove any friction between people who wanted to donate and the donation locations.

All of us had personal experiences and connections to this situation- which impressed upon us the importance of designing something practical, usable, and simple. Even more than usual, this project called for an emphasis on well-rounded understanding and problem-solving rather than artistry.

This approach was especially important considering the extreme emotions the user experiences in their situation, particularly that people generally want to help; they are just looking for that opportunity.

Listening to our interviewees recount such interesting experiences was an automatic boost to the empathy and compassion we had for our users.

The first round of interviews quickly produced a number of distinct trends.

Key insights:

• • The most important is that when they want to help; their attempt won’t be hindered by service inconvenience
  • The problem is not at the actual transfusion process, but where the donation goes
  • The burden of finding transportation to donation centers
  • A user friendly platform for scheduling and finding more information

Where do our users need us to step in?

With a list of primary pain points and concerns for our users, we conducted a few more interviews with an updated table of questions to gain context around their pain points.

From there we took all of our findings and created a user journey map with emotional states and thoughts annotated.

With a more complete mental model of what our users were going through, we were able to determine the specific problem we should be solving for our users.

Solving which problem will provide the maximum effect?

Once we had agreed on a direction, we chose to send out a survey via social media to donors who have been in these scenarios. We included a section to rate each of the pain points we identified by importance on a scale of 1–10.

The fear our users felt about giving blood for the first time was clearly a distressing factor, beyond just the distance of the donation centers

When users have a fear of seeing their own blood it often conflicts with their desire to help save a life.

Addressing this problem would also help alleviate some worry and their fear. Our users should expect that donating blood is safe and simple. Actual donation times take about 10 minutes for 1 pint of blood.

With a mobile-friendly app users can find alternative ways to give such as volunteering opportunities and financial contributions. A lot of these alternative ways of giving ends up helping Bloodworks medical services and cure-finding research.

What are the ways we could solve the problem?

After our Information Architecture was completed, the wireframing began in earnest. We used divergent thinking to find as many alternative setups as quickly as possible through sketching.

Heavy collaboration during this phase was the key to the variety and speed we enjoyed, and through this constant sharing of ideas, we identified the strongest ones. We put the strongest ideas into Balsamiq for testing.

Did we get it right? Is there a better way?

Conducting usability testing in tandem with our design process allowed us to make essential tweaks on the fly, instead of having to endure the tedious process of a large change at the last minute too often. Once we reached a saturated enough point in our wire-framing we created a basic prototype in Invision.

The testing revealed problems in the microcopy, the nav style, and part of the site structure. We did a card sort to pick new labels and conducted a few quick tests that validated the new labeling and nav systems.