THE PROBLEM
Blood saves lives and improves health. Blood transfusion is needed for multiple purposes. There is a constant need for a regular blood supply. Regular blood donations by a sufficient number of healthy people are needed to ensure that enough blood is available when needed. There is a lack of awareness and a negative attitude towards blood donation among a considerable percentage of the population. This results in poor participation in blood donation. Therefore there is a critical need for culture-building activities and programs to increase awareness and improve their attitude towards blood donation. Also, people living away from their families may have medical emergencies. During such times getting quick help is difficult as they don’t have enough contacts. Such situations are stressful and asking and going in search of help is time consuming. Frequently on Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp, we run over such blood request messages and a few of us disregard them, questioning the authenticity of the message.
Hospitals that are short of blood often ask a patient’s family to find replacement donors and if it is a rare blood group, it is even more difficult get it. Furthermore, due to improper testing of blood sample from the donor, a lot of units go to waste due to which the patient and their family suffer and have to look for new blood donors and find difficulty in looking for donors through social media.
MY ROLE
My role in this project was ideation of the app, doing desk research, conducting surveys,
interviewing people, making user persona, journey mapping, branding, making wireframes, designing high fidelity prototype and usability testing.
UNDERSTANDING THE USER
The main goal of the research was to go deeper and understand why and what of the problem and also understand underlying reasons and opinions.
As we are creating a product for our end users, so user research is the only way to understand the user’s needs. Therefore I deconstructed the problems in to tangible subproblems, which we tackled by establishing research goals.
To understand the problem better, we created three-categories for user interview and survey
1. People who have faced a situation where blood donor was needed
2. People who have donated blood
3. People who haven’t donated blood
Target Users
-
The target audience of this project is people aged between 18–45 and are healthy.
-
Those who have donated blood, are willing to donate blood.
-
Those who have received blood in a hassle situation.
BREAKING DOWN THE PROCESS
-
BloodBud is a blood donation application that interfaces voluntary donors straight forwardly to patients needing blood.
-
It makes the method involved with contacting potential donors simple, and urges individuals to turn into a wilful donor.
-
Donors can see their effect and create awareness around blood donation. BloodBud is focused on using a technological solution to help people who are in need of blood and also to those people who are willing to donate blood. It can bridge the gap between both groups by a common medium of BloodBud Application. It matches blood donors with blood seekers based on the info of patients inputted by hospitals and donation banks.
-
Creating a platform where the blood donors and blood recipients will communicate directly.
-
Design an easy platform to find donors.
-
This platform will also provide information about the nearest blood bank in the surrounding location.
-
It will also do a basic eligibility test for those who are willing to donate blood.
-
This platform would also contain blogs and posts related to health for the public’s knowledge and lack of awareness.
-
The recipients would be able to leave feedback on their experience with the donor.
LESSONS LEARNED
This UX case study has been a challenging and rewarding experience for me. I was overwhelmed by the idea of an app for blood donation and talking to strangers for the usability testings. However, it turned out to be an amazing experience to understand users and find out what makes the tick.
Although I had a very short timeline for this project, I am glad to learn that even by making small changes, we are able to yield big impacts and create a great experience for users. Also, it is so important to always validate our assumptions through testing