Encouraging donors to book more regularly with a new feature in existing Lifeblood App.

Overview

The Australian Red Cross Lifeblood needs more people to donate more regularly so they can keep up with demand. COVID impacted donation rates significantly due to high levels of cancellations. The business needs an increase of at least 45% in 2022 to meet these demands.

My Role

Project Manager, Design Strategy,

User Researcher, UI/UX Designer, Prototyping and Usability Testing

Goals

Tools Used

Business goal is to improve the digital experience to encourage donors

to book more often.

From the user's perspective, we needed to understand:

- the behaviours and motivations of past and current donors

- how to motivate them to return

- identify any friction points in the donation process

Figma, Miro, Trello

Conclusions

Through prioritising time and location instead of date alone, we believe that the DONATE TODAY feature will encourage past donors to donate more regularly and help Lifeblood meet the current demand for blood.

View Prototype

“Donating comes with the 2-sided reward - giving back and the feeling that you have done done something good” Laura, 23

Help - Where did all our donors go?

Screen Shot 2022-03-24 at 10.10.23 pm.png

The Australian Red Cross needs more people to donate on a more regular basis.

The COVID pandemic has left people feeling unmotivated, emotionally exhausted and unable to meet commitments. This has led to 1 in 5 people cancelling appointments per week.

The business needs an increase of at least 45% in 2022 to meet these demands. They think that one way to do this is to improve the digital experience to encourage donors, particularly current or past donors, to continue coming back and not cancel.

Was Lifeblood the only charity that was affected by COVID?

We wanted to find out WHY donation rates declined during COVID and in order to do this we needed to understand:

The behaviours and motivations of past and current donors
How to motivate them to return
Identify any friction points in the process

User interviews and market research would begin the research process.

We couldn’t find any direct data about why people stopped donating blood so we investigated how COVID affected voluntary participation in other charities and voluntary organisations.

Adapted from: https://research.psy.uq.edu.au/dorn/rare-motivation/

5 reasons why people donate

Adapted from: https://theconversation.com/loss-of-two-thirds-of-volunteers-delivers-another-covid-blow-to-communities-159327

So what was the need exactly?

We had to hear it from the people!

From the secondary research and assumptions, we created a discussion plan with the questions around 4 main areas of investigation:

How people donated blood
What were the reasons why they stopped donating
How the pandemic affected the life of the donors
Why people donated blood

We interviewed 20 people to better understand motivations and behaviours of people who donate/used to donate.

What did our Users say?

We needed to synthesize this data.

We used affinity mapping to synthesize the data from our user interviews. We founds trends and patterns and grouped them accordingly. Rephrasing each category into an "I" statement allowed us to have an insight from our user's perspective.

At this stage we made a couple of decisions:

We would create 3 Personas. Each persona encapsulates a different perspective (revealed from insights gained from user interviews).
We would create an Empathy map for each of these personas to better understand what they experienced around them.
We would focus on the Lifeblood App as it was the platform most used by donors to make bookings.

Who are we talking to?

Why we chose Max

We decided that Max was our Primary Persona because he donated in the past, representing 40% of our target audience. We knew that donors who used to donate were more likely to re-engage than those that have never donated before.

Based on our current task analysis and to better understand Max, we needed to understand his emotional journey when booking an appointment around his schedule.

Defining the key problem.

"Max needs to schedule blood donation appointments when it is convenient for him, because he loses motivation if he has to wait."

But what does convenience mean for Max?

Based on the insights (from our user interviews) and journey mapping, we concluded that:

"Max wanted to prioritise his schedule and emotional state over donating"

This helped us further refine what we wanted to solve for on the App.

Why was Lifeblood making it difficult for people
(like Max) to donate?

Max wanted to be able to donate when HE wanted to. We went back to our interviewees and asked them about the reminder system.

We knew that Lifeblood used phone calls but they also used SMS and emails as reminders.

What was interesting was at the footer of the email, it instructed donors that if they could not find an appointment that suited them, they needed to go back and keep checking to see if their time becomes available!

A CLUE!

The journey map revealed that Max feels pretty good when he tries to make an appointment- he feels like he is making a difference.

If he cannot find an appointment on the day that is suitable for him, he will book it anyway. He will then try to reschedule and avoid contact with Lifeblood as he feels guilty that he didn’t attend. He loses motivation and doesn’t donate.

According to the reminder email, Max is supposed to keep trying to re-book if he cannot find a convenient appointment. Max, who has low motivation, is now forced to keep going on the App to find a suitable appointment. It is obvious that he would just give up and is a huge pain point in the donation process that we could solve for.

'How Might We ensure that convenience is forefront in the scheduling process.'

How Might We solve this problem?

Ideation by a quick round of Crazy 8s revealed 24 different ideas but there were 3 main features that we wanted to include:

An interactive map
Fast track link
Sort clinics by distance and next available

We refined these further using Design Studio process.

Focusing the problem: Hypothesis

'We believe Max will be able to donate blood when it is convenient for him if we provide a way to prioritise time and location during the booking process. We will know this is true when Max begins to donate blood more regularly.'

Which features to include?

What we knew at this point

We needed to prioritise time and location for Max.

The business goals of bringing back past donors

Max's goals to be able to book an appointment when it was convenient for him

Our users told us that the Lifeblood App was easy to use. We did not need to redesign the whole Lifeblood App, we were including a NEW FEATURE!

Using an MVP matrix, we took the main features that we would like to see in our iteration of the flow of the current Lifeblood App.

We prioritised the features that would have the highest impact, for the lowest effort (by the business). We decided on the following 3 features to include in the first prototype:

Next available time
Show available location in map
Notification SMS with a link to our Donate Today feature

How did the current Lifeblood App work?

We needed to understand the flow in the current Lifeblood App to ascertain where we could introduce our new feature.

Current flow:

Enter location/clinic
Select date
Select time
Confirm appointment

Introducing the DONATE TODAY Feature

By prioritising time and location, we now have a different flow to this part

of the current Lifeblood App.

New flow:

1. Enter location

2. Select time and location closest to you

3. Confirm appointment.

Get to Know Us

SMS reminder, copy introduces the DONATE TODAY feature with a link straight to the Eligibility Questionnaire.

Use of copy on buttons to encourage and acknowledge donors.

Information around preparation and COVID safety included in Confirmation screen.

Using UX copywriting, we incorporated Donate Today feature into Lifeblood App.

Use of copy to emphasize TODAY.

Testing the Donate Today feature

Test, iterate and test again.

We conducted 2 rounds of usability testing, each time with 4 users.

Round 1- Low-fidelity wireframes

The main takeaways from the first round of testing:

Make link more clear - change colour
Donate Later should be bigger
Wasn’t sure what to do on the interactive map- didn’t know what to click- this was where the major work needed to be done.
Want to be able to see what I need to bring before appointment

Round 2 - Mid-fidelity wireframes

Using the comments from the first round of user testing, we made major changes mainly to the interactive map screen.

1. We removed the time bar and included this information along with the distance from the current location next to each clinic in the map.

2. We also included a pop up overlay similar to that seen in the current Lifeblood APP but emphasising the donation was TODAY.

Round 3 - Hi-fidelity wireframes

The main takeaways from this usability testing were minor edits to the Search screen.

Increase font size of time and location on the map
Include a pin as to where the donor was in relation to the clinic

Linking it all together-interactive prototype