Bridging the gap between Blood Donors & Patients — UI/UX Case Study
Project Background
Connecting Drops is a blood donation app that connects voluntary donors directly to patients in need of blood. It makes the process of reaching out to potential donors easy, and encourages people to become a voluntary donor. Donors can see their impact and create awareness around blood donation.
Project type: Personal Project
Problem Space
Sending out blood donor urgently required message may be one of the scariest moments of anyone’s life. You hope and pray that someone in the long chain of receivers may match the blood type and be willing to donate in the nick of time. Often on Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp, we come across such forwarded messages and some of us ignore them, doubting the legitimacy of the message.
While the need for blood is universal, access to it is sadly not.
Hospitals that are short of blood often ask a patient’s family to find what are called “replacement donors” and if it is a rare blood group, it is even more difficult. Furthermore, due to connectivity issues (among blood banks) and shelf life of blood, a lot of units go to waste due to which the patient and their family suffer and have to look for blood donors and find difficulty in looking for donors through social media.
User Research
Always talk to your user
The goal of the research was to go deeper and understand why and what of the problem and also understand underlying reasons and opinions.
To understand the problem better, we created three-bucket for user interview and survey
- People who have faced a situation where blood donor was needed
- People who have donated blood
- People who haven’t donated blood
After performing user interviews with 10 people and an online survey with 40+ responses, we discovered areas of key problem, areas that Connecting Drops could address.
Problem Space#1: Finding Donors
- Posting on multiple social platforms is tiring, consumes a lot of time and doesn’t get a positive response
- Not able to find donors who are nearby or available
- People who require regular blood transfusion for critical diseases need blood donation often
- After a long process of finding a donor, the donor isn’t fit to donate
Problem space #2: Limited knowledge/awareness
- There is a lack of trust and transparency around blood donation and blood donation camps
- Messages in different social groups don’t provide enough information to decide and gain trust
- Lack of awareness as to if the Donor is fit to donate
Problem Space #3: Lack of motivation
- Not enough information to go and donate on a regular basis — limited knowledge/awareness
- Result of their action isn’t clearly visible — In blood donation drives, the donor is never informed about their impact
Problem space #4: Availability
- Unaware of the availability in blood banks and travelling to different blood banks is a pain
- A donor isn’t able to help, if the patient isn’t in a reachable area and has to travel far from work or home
- Distance is a problem on both sides, the patient’s family doesn’t find a donor who is available and nearby.
Opportunity Space
Based on user research synthesis, it became apparent that there is a gap between Patients and Potential Donors with multiple problem areas.
Defining 📝
Persona
Using Qualitative & Quantitative and online research to make a persona for both donor and patient’s family member/receiver. These Personas were used to guide my design decision and priorities.
Please meet Gaurav and Priyanka! 😌
Empathy Map
I learned a new UX method and applied it to my process. The best way to understand the patient’s family and donors was through empathy mapping, I facilitated this activity with my other designer friend, and to use it as a guide to understanding what users Think 🤔 , Feel 😰 , Do 🤠 and Say 😛
“Empathy begins with getting to know people as people, not just as users.”
After learning about pain points, frustrations, needs and emotions, I went ahead to address the problems that we discovered; keeping the patient and donor in mind.
Addressing: Finding Donors
- Providing easy access to potential donors — connecting patients directly to voluntary donors
- Enabling reaching out to donors in a nearby area
- Helping people to understand if they are fit to donate
Addressing: Limited Knowledge/awareness
- Providing enough information to take decision with ease
- Educating people on how and who can donate
Addressing: Lack of motivation
- Lowering the barriers of donation which result in higher motivation
- Boosting motivation through:
- Providing Feedback on how they helped people
- Impact tracking
- Sharing their story
Addressing: Availability
- Providing Patient with blood units in case no donor is available so they don’t have to travel to different blood banks
- Enabling control over when the person is available to donate
Ideate 🧠
We came up with several core features that would capture the opportunity spaces that we’ve identified.
- Blood request requirement feature which can reach out to potential donors
- Nearby feature to easily find donors and patients nearby
- Become a Voluntary donor and track your impact and see a real-time active feed
- Control when you want to donate and receive donation request accordingly
- Schedule donation date according to your convenience
- A beforehand eligibility test for people to check if they can donate
- Get blood directly from blood banks
In order to provide patients with blood, in case no donor is available I required an understanding of how blood banks worked, how they operated and connected with hospitals, what cost did they incur, how did they reached out to potential donors and helped patients, what are the current solutions, was there an existing service to provide blood directly to patients?
So one day I was going to my college and spotted a blood donation drive near the metro station and I went down and had an informal interview with Mr Sahil Khan (Manager of blood donation drive). He was generous to answer my questions and helped me understand how things work.
Key things I learned :
- Patients with Thalassemia major involve lifelong regular blood transfusion usually administered every 2–5 weeks.
- The process of getting a blood unit from the blood bank requires certain document work from the hospital and the blood bank
- The blood units are usually carried in an icebox at a temperature 20–24 degree C
- The blood banks in order to give blood units, require a sample test of the blood
- They face difficulty in finding rare blood groups
- There is a connectivity issue between different blood banks across the city due to the ownership
- The cost they take was only the testing price but it varies
- There is usually more requirement for donors for platelets because it has a short shelf life
User Task Flow
Visualization of the flow of steps a user needs to take to complete a specific task on the App. we explored the flow and how the user will be interacting with yes or no conditions.
Card Sorting
I used both open and closed card sorting method to help design and evaluate information architecture. This session provided us with the foundation to the structure of our product and insight into how a user would expect the information to be organized.
I performed card sorting with 3 people
It was interesting to notice how information was categorized by the participant, some terms didn’t make sense so we changed the terms, some of the information was not put in any category
Sitemap
I combined all the observations and patterns noticed during card sorting to iterate and build a sitemap.
Sketch Up!
This is where we go crazy with ideas. I came up with several potential solutions to each of the pain points and made some rough sketches.
Visual Design 🌈
The juicy part 😋 . After a lot of iterations and spending countless hours and making sure the visuals are perfect in these screens, here they are.
A comprehensive hub
A single place to discover everything for finding blood donor, donating blood, ordering blood, become a donor and donation needs.
We have users who have different use case on the platform and these use case can cross each other, for example, a user who donated blood might need to find donors later.
Become a blood donor
Making it easy for users to register as a donor and see a nearby request of patients. Providing information so donors can decide better and offer help.
Learn something you never knew before
This is all about educating users and busting myths regarding blood donation and who and when can donate blood if they fall into any of the mentioned categories.
Save a wasted journey
One of the biggest challenges was “ after a long process of finding a donor, the donor isn’t fit to donate”
so I looked up for a donor form and checked what are the things that are considered before taking blood so I came around some common questions or reasons for why a person cannot donate. It is a test which reduces the chances of “ going and finding out you can’t donate”
But the final call is up to the medical professionals
Find Donors
Raise a blood donor requirement request to reach potential donors and find nearby donors.
Push notification to registered donors in the nearby area
This is how a requirement of blood donor reaches to potential donors nearby
Cards
Cards used for different use cases.
Get blood units directly from blood banks
This was one of the toughest to work on especially on the part of how it is feasible and what all processes happen within and communicating this to end-users.
Impact tracking and user control
See your impact and control when you are available to donate or schedule a donation date according to your convenience. See how you are doing in your community and see a live feed of people donating. Receive a badge of honor for your contribution.
Reflecting and Learnings
I found this project a helpful way of learning the basics of UX/UI design. I’m amazed by how much I’ve learned.
Things I could have done better :
- Think more on the business side of it, especially with getting blood units from blood banks, logistics and feasibility
- Also, a hospital environment is very different and could work closely on how people feel and work in those circumstances
Things I learned:
- I learned that understanding the user and asking the right questions and your own research is very important to build a deeper understanding of the problem
- The design process is not linear and you sometimes go back to the research phase or even back to where you started
- I learned new UX methods like empathy mapping and card sorting
- Iterate ..iterate ..iterate
This is my first project as I learn more I expect to apply everything I learned to my current career and onward. 🚀Although this was just scratching the surface, the skills I will take away will be very useful for my future projects.😉
❤️ Thanks for reading! Please leave a feedback below on the design and the article (It is my first).
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