Project Overview
Client
INOVA Hospital, NOVA Community College
My Role
UI/UX, Concept Design
Team Members: Jeevna Prakash
The Challenge
Blood donations are often in low supply, and people are unmotivated by a free t-shirt to make the time commitment to donate. While our local hospital is large and well stocked, this isn’t the case in my hometown of Sterling, VA. People often don’t realize the necessity of rare blood types, and even more don’t even consider donating because they don’t know their type.
While volunteering at our local blood drive, our team ideated a solution to the problem we saw while attempting to sign up more donors. In coordination with the Red Cross and INOVA Hospital, we came up with a concept design!
User Interviews
Before diving into the features and the overall UX of our product we conducted some user interviews.
Some of our interviews included friends and pre-health professionals to gain a better understanding of the problem. These are some the key takeaways from those interviews:
Key insights:
Hospitals don’t know who to ask for more blood other than previous donors
Donors are not encouraged to donate for the first time, since exposure is very low in blood donation vans/pop-ups
Key experience principles:
Friendly: Users would want to know who their blood goes too
Private: Hospitals would need to confirm blood types so no mix-ups happen
Encouraging: A key idea is to add donors whenever possible, like at a hospital when patients are given a routine blood test
Design and Prototype
Sometimes one of the bravest decisions a designer can make during a project cycle is terminating a feature that seems so innovative on a design standpoint, but in the end never translates to the user understanding the feature.
Next Steps:
Development of an B-Hero extension for browsers and integration in other mobile content browsing apps.
Design user on-boarding screens to familiarize them with features within the app; option to turn on and off app feature guidance.
Develop analytics measurements system within the app to help inform the design refinement of B-Hero's features that better serve users needs.
