A UX Case Study:
The enigma of Donation Motivation
Using UX design to encourage Red Cross Lifeblood donors to donate blood regularly
The Breakdown
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BACKGROUND
Australian Red Cross Lifeblood understand the difficulties that exist when it comes to asking people to donate blood. Compounded with a global pandemic and it's easy to see why Lifeblood are facing a severe threat to maintaining critical blood supply levels for Australians in medical need.
In order to address these concerns, Lifeblood launched an advertising initiative calling on donors for help and creating website space to enlighten any misconceptions about the safety of donating blood during and after the pandemic.
But what Lifeblood really needs are regular donors and more of them, they needed donors to continue coming back and not cancel appointments.
THE STARTING POINT
Previous research conducted by Lifeblood, revealed it's easier to encourage former donors to make repeat donations - because of a lower barrier to entry- than to convert new donors. if we were going to design an experience that would keep donors coming back regularly, we needed to understand who these donors are, what motivates them, what influences them and why are they cancelling?
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RESEARCH
To ascertain the qualitative and quantitative data needed, our team recognised immediately the value in several research techniques: field studies, surveys, interviews and competitor analysis.
Through synthesis of the research data we were able to identify three donor personas: the non-blood donor, the irregular blood donor and the regular donor. What the research also uncovered were crucial insights into our persona behaviours.
Our primary insight being: people often donated with the external pressure of a family member or friend. They were being gently influenced to make a decision.
IDEATION
Building the crux around our irregular donor persona and primary insight, we entered the ideation phase with focus and solidified our proposed solution: the Team challenge function based on social interaction. But it was through site mapping and task flows that the real opportunity was discovered - the current mobile app lacked a team function.
PROTOTYPING
Starting with low fidelity wireframing, we were able to map our user journeys, identifying areas of friction and assessing aspects of design along the way. Several rounds of usability testing and iterative designs culminated in a functioning high fidelity prototype, incorporating the solutions to the user experience.
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DEVELOPMENT
Investing in multiple rounds of prototyping, testing and iterating, we honed all our research and feedback into a functional, hi-fidelity prototype which incorporated multiple facets to solve the challenge.
1. Global navigation
A consolidated global navigation menu with a new Team tab that allows the creation of new teams and to join existing teams.
2. Clear onboarding
A consolidated global navigation menu with a new Team tab that allows the creation of new teams and to join existing teams.
3. Relay challenge concept
Employing a social based challenge that engages the team, the relay concept is rooted in social accountability and commitment. Team members are dependent on one another and therefore encourage each other to complete the challenge goals.
4. Shared team dashboard
A synchronised team dashboard keeps members up to date with who’s next to donate, how the team is progressing, displays visual metrics based on milestones that appeal to altruism and has the ability to send reminders to other members.
5. Enhanced information architecture
Based on global competitor analysis, the information architecture was modified placing the eligibility questionnaire in the last steps of the booking process. At this late stage, the user has already invested time and effort, leaving now would be a waste. Thus, reducing the rate of abandonment.
6. Social media sharing
Research showed users want to spread awareness but often choose not to, this feature allows them to do so if they wish. It is hoped the social aspect of the challenge will help normalise spreading awareness through social media. Every challenge milestone is met with an option to share.
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READ THE FULL CASE STUDY BELOW
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READ THE FULL CASE STUDY BELOW //
THE CHALLENGE
Synopsis
Australian Red Cross Lifeblood are facing a crisis. Blood levels are at an all time low and donation cancellations at an all time high. Covid has decimated the health system and people are scared. With 30,000 blood donors needed every week to keep up supply levels, the future is looking bleak.
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Researcher
Designer
Prototyper
Delivery -
Figma
Illustrator
Photoshop
Miro
Notion -
Prototype
User interface
Presentation
Case Study
THE MISSION
Objectives
Find out who Lifeblood's donors are and why they are cancelling.
Penetrate into their psyche and discover what motivates them to donate blood.
Assess their behaviours and uncover their pain points.
Use this data to build the ultimate Donation Motivation solution.
Save the world…or at least increase the blood donation rates and save lives — that’s pretty good too.
Have yourself a cold one, ‘cos you deserve it.
Understanding the challenge
1 in 3 Australians will require blood at some point in their life.
Every week over 30,000 donors are needed around Australia to keep the supply up.
1 in 5 people are canceling each week citing 'social hangover' and stress caused by Covid.
43% of first time donors never return.
An increase of 45% (140,000 donors) is needed to keep up with demand in 2022.
Background
Australian Red Cross Lifeblood understand the difficulties that exist when it comes to asking people to donate blood. Compounded with a global pandemic and it's easy to see why Lifeblood are facing a severe threat to maintaining critical blood supply levels for Australians in medical need.
In order to address these concerns, Lifeblood launched an advertising initiative calling on donors for help and creating website space to enlighten any misconceptions about the safety of donating blood during and after the pandemic.
But what Lifeblood really needed were regular donors and more of them, they needed donors to continue coming back and not cancel.
Previous research conducted by Lifeblood, revealed it's easier to encourage former donors to make repeat donations - because of a lower barrier to entry- than to convert new donors.
But if we were going to design an experience that would keep donors coming back regularly, we needed to understand who these donors are, what motivates them, what influences them and why are they cancelling?
PHASE ONE
Discover—Research
Much of our research was focused on the underlying initial motivation of why a person donates and what are the reasons why they might not return for subsequent donations. We began wide with the broad key areas of who, why, what, when and how:
Who are Lifeblood's donors?
Why do they donate blood?
What difficulties do they encountering when donating?
When do they donate and how?
We then aimed to narrow down into the emotional details to garner further insights:
What's important to you about donating blood?
How do you feel when you donate?
How do you feel when you see/hear of others donating?
Do you to want to donate again? Why?
What currently prevents you?
Research Methodology
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We needed to experience the entire process end-to-end, including donating blood.
Two of our brave researchers went and donated blood to experience the process as past of a holistic approach. -
Targeting non-donors, other donors (everything but blood) and blood donors to gain statistics about our user.
44 Surveys were completed over the course of the research phase. -
Extract as much qualitative information and insights into donors.
14 interviews were conducted with blood donors as well as non-blood donors. -
Conducted competitor and comparative analysis to see how other nations are combating similar issues.
PHASE TWO
Define — who are Lifeblood’s current donors?
Discovering donor insights
Sifting through the immensity of our research data, we began affinity mapping based on common themes, insights, statements and behaviours. The mapping uncovered two key insights that we ranked as primary and secondary:
Primary insight: People often donated with the external pressure of a family member or friend. They were being gently influenced to make a decision.
“I donated in high school because some of my friends did!”
“I first donated blood in uni with a friend.”
Secondary insight: even though they were doing a good deed, many donors did not want to 'advertise' their altruism. It felt too much like bragging.
“I don’t want to show off that I’m donating.”
“Just donate and know you’re doing a good thing, no need to brag.”
Other interesting revelations that piqued our curiosity included:
Ultimately, altruism was the main reason for donating
Scheduling conflicts often prevented people from committing to appointments
Motivation needs to be consistent and constant
Our quantitative survey data underpinned these insights reinforcing our line of investigation further:
45% want to help others
27% want to give back
14% donate because of family or friends
We were slowly beginning to understand who Lifeblood’s donors are.
Introducing our donor archetypes
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These are occasional donors of various facets including time (volunteering), money, hair, clothing, household items, etc. Although they are charitable to an extent, they are not blood donors. They face too many points of friction that prohibit them from even entertaining the idea of donating blood, a considerable one being fear. A valuable insight this particular archetype did highlight was their need to be prompted to donate; whether through friends, change in life situation or external pressure.
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Regular blood donors make regular bookings to donate blood, usually just after they've donated. Consistently aware of when they can next donate, they are vocal in their social circles about donating and strive to normalise the conversation without guilt shaming. Their motivation is altruistic at its core but more than that, they view it as their duty to help because they can.
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This archetype have donated blood before but either never return or donate sporadically (once a year or less). They want to donate more, they aspire to be regular donors and, after all, they did motivate themselves to donate before. The frustration lies in their hectic lifestyles, donating needs to fit in with their busy social schedule. They want gentle reminders because they just can't seem to get into the habit of regularly donating blood.
We had our archetypes but we couldn’t focus on all their needs, we had to align Lifeblood’s goals with the donors’ goals. Based on this, the irregular blood donor was our obvious priority.
But why the irregular donor?
The choice was clear through a simple process of elimination.
The regular donor is the ideal, they are motivated, vocal, aware and active in their approach to donating. Their friction points are minimal and easily overcome because of their dedication to the cause.
The non-blood donors were ruled out because they face perceived insurmountable challenges when it came to donating blood; fear being a major obstacle. Fear was evident in the unknown but also as a phobia towards needles and the process as a whole. They are content to donate in other means.
And that left us with the irregular donor which neatly aligned with Lifeblood’s goals and the archetype’s goals; Lifeblood wanted repeat donors, we knew return donors are easier to encourage back and irregular donors aspire to become regular donors.
Using our highlighted insights and the collected research data - focusing on frequency, donation type, motivation, influences and challenges - we were able to identify three main donor archetypes; the non-blood donor, the irregular donor and the regular donor.
Meet Jessica: the irregular blood donor
Jessica the socially active and busy working professional, has donated blood a few times before influenced by her friends. Her friend recently reminded her about donating blood and thinks, "I should really do that again", but finds it hard to commit to booking because of her busy social lifestyle. She wishes there were an easier way to commit to donating blood as she has the heart to help people in need.
Demographics
29 years old
Female
Professional and educated
Socially active
Behaviours
Influenced by social circles/networks.
Altruistic tendencies/motivations
Needs and Goals
Need for time, accessibility and gentle reminders.
Jessica’s goal is to become a regular donor/to donate more.
Frustrations
Donating conflicts with lifestyle/schedule
In order to provide a solution for Jessica, we needed to formulate a statement that would encapsulate her needs and goals, while also uncovering space for opportunities to achieve these. We brainstormed many, but distilled it down to one critical sentence:
Jessica needs to create a habit of regularly donating blood so that she can help people in need.
This statement cut to the very core of what Jessica stands for and what she needs to achieve her values. But how was she going to do this?
Using ‘How Might We…’ statements (HMW), we were able breakdown and analyse the problem statement which exposed a wide scope of interesting and unique queries. We deliberated over our numerous HMWs and solidified two crucial approaches:
HMW create a habit through motivation?
HMW use Jessica’s social nature to create a habit?
PHASE THREE
Develop—finding the right solution
With Jessica on the brain and our HMWs on our minds, we completed rounds of brainstorming workshops, until our ideas were depleted and becoming non-sensical — a definite sign you’ve drained your creative juices. What we had produced were a series of sketches that could be potential solutions to Jessica’s needs.
Feature Prioritisation
Funnelling down the ideas using the feature prioritisation technique MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won’t) and Level of Effort (LoE), we plotted our top concepts on an impact/effect matrix.
Our matrix revealed an interesting development. A lot of the low effort/high value features could potentially reside within the team function, bolstering the function with robust features and addressing the needs of Lifeblood and Jessica.
The current sitemap for Lifeblood.
Proposed sitemap integrating new team function.
Task Flows
We now had where the team function was going to reside in the app, but we needed to clarify how it will perform tasks and how features will cohesively integrate within the existing app. Task flows helped visualise these basic functions that would be the crux to the team element.
Task flows visualised how a feature would function within the app.
Task flow for making an appointment to donate blood.
Task flow highlighting the new team function within the process.
Site mapping
Since the function would integrate into Lifeblood’s current mobile app, we took to site mapping to identify the appropriate residency of the function to maximise its effectiveness.
PHASE FOUR
Deliver—Let’s make stuff!
Prototyping
Since our team function incorporated many already existing app screens and due to time constraints, we decided taking screen shots and manipulating these into mid-fidelity wireframes would ultimately prove more efficient.
Evident through site mapping was the fact that the ‘Appointments’ and ‘Book’ buttons on the global navigation of the app were essentially performing the same function. We decided to consolidate these two buttons which created space for our new ‘Team’ button.
Keeping Jessica’s social nature in mind, we implemented a shared team dashboard where members could see the progress of the team challenge and statistics of how the team is making an impact for Lifeblood. Added to this, was a shared calendar allowing members to view everyone’s donation bookings.
After performing some comparative analysis, we rounded out our design with industry standards for creating a team, setting parameters (such as challenge time length) and sending invites to potential members.
Create a team screen, shared dashboard and calendar mid-fidelity prototype.
Initial rounds of usability testing proved a little disheartening.
Users were able to perform the tasks asked but the function lacked a difference between simply booking an appointment and motivating a user to regularly donate blood. We had appealed to the social nature of Jessica by creating a social team, but the function still lacked the ability to generate motivation to donate. It was simply tracking donations between friends.
Issues, ideate and iterate
We listed out the issues based on our feedback so we could see what was going wrong:
How was this creating motivation to donate?
A time limit isn’t a goal.
Milestones need to appeal to altruism.
Jessica needs motivation to create a habit.
This provided some clarity to which we could ideate a possible solution. Our solution to the issue of motivation was tri-fold:
We removed the time frame aspect, it wasn’t a goal.
We added an achievable team oriented goal; this appeals to Jessica’s social nature as it actively involves her friendship circle.
We added an element of social commitment and accountability.
We did these three things by introducing a Blood donation relay concept.
Usability testing
Jessica creates a team, invites her friends to participate because she’s social and it’s a good cause. They donate in sequence keeping each other accountable and encouraging one another — because you can’t donate before its your turn. They share their achievements on social media, creating awareness as well as promoting and prompting others to donate or create their own teams.
How does it work?
Creating a team and inviting members to join adds to the social element.
This appeals to Jessica on multiple levels:
It’s social, she has her friends support and can share their achievements on social media — It’s not Jessica alone trying to make regular donations, she’s got her squad.
It’s altruistic and is ultimately all for a good cause which is a core value of Jessica’s.
The app has automatic reminders but Jessica also has her friends reminding and depending on her, which keep Jessica on track to make her commitments, eventually becoming a regular donor.
The shared dashboard and calendar keep motivation high through social accountability.
Cognitive overload
Another round of usability testing and another serve of humble pie.
Although the relay concept theoretically appealed to our persona Jessica and connected to the problem statement, the actual delivery was confusing. The UX writing and complexity of the relay concept was proving too much for users to grasp. Too much dense information was being forced onto the user effectively hitting the proverbial brick wall that is cognitive overload.
The issues:
Too much information on screens
Confusing terms and explanations
Our solution:
Expand into an onboarding experience
Develop clear and concise UX writing
Overload solution - Onboarding
Referring to industry standards, our onboarding process separated each step into a single page allowing users to digest bite sized explanations easily and clearly. Succinct, articulate UX writing aided explanations where and if needed at all.
And usability testing supported the iterations. The concept of how a blood donation relay works was beginning to translate easier to our user.
But we still had some minor issues in order to fine tune the process we still had to run some AB testing.
Clarifying terminology that was still presenting as confusing was the focus of our AB testing and required quality UX writing to solve.
For example, the term lap was a sticking point and the relay concept of sequential donating was still slightly disconnected. Through rounds of AB testing, we made several changes to help address these issues.
We removed the term lap and replaced it with round. So instead of complete a lap, we reworded it to say complete a round which made more sense to users during AB testing. Lap was too ambiguous, lacked a clear definition in this context.
We also added in concise and clear reminders of how the relay works to help clarify the concept.
AB Testing
The Solution
01
GLOBAL TEAM TAB
A consolidated global navigation menu with an added Team Tab which allows the creation of new teams and to join existing teams.
02
CLEAR ONBOARDING PROCESS
A streamlined onboarding process when creating a new team that uses clear UX writing to explain the relay challenge concept. One task per page ensures cognitive overload is avoided.
03
RELAY CHALLENGE CONCEPT
Employing a social based challenge that engages the team, the relay concept is rooted in social accountability and commitment. Team members are dependent on one another and therefore encourage each other to complete the challenge goals.
04
SHARED TEAM DASHBOARD
A synchronised team dashboard keep members up to date with who’s next to donate, how the team is progressing, displays visual metrics based on milestones that appeal to altruism and has the ability to send reminders to other members.
05
ENHANCED INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Based on global competitor analysis, the information architecture was modified placing the eligibility questionnaire in the last steps of the booking process. At this late stage, the user has already invested time and effort, leaving now would be a waste. Thus reducing the rate of abandonment.
06
SHARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Research showed users want to spread awareness but often choose not to, this feature allows them to do so if they wish. It is hoped the social aspect of the challenge will help normalise spreading awareness through social media. Every challenge milestone is met with an option to share.
Next steps
Incorporate cancellation notification/alert feature with text field for ‘reasons for cancellation’ to gather data.
Develop and integrate individual member profiles within the team dashboard.
Further rigorous testing of the hi-fi prototype, implement insightful iterations based on feedback.
Conduct a diary survey with teams over the course of 12 months to identify if user behaviour has changed and donating habits have formed.
Once the mobile app is approved and launched, apply the new team function design to the desktop website.
Reflections
In an ideal world, it would have been great to work alongside Lifeblood’s digital team and to have more time to fully immerse ourselves into the research aspect of this project. Research is the foundation of all our decisions so its importance and accuracy can’t be stated enough. Having said that and considering time constraints, we worked well to gather the data we could; interviewing and surveying multiple people who donate blood for first hand data. Deliberating and synthesising the research data is another time intensive task, time blocking was crucial to keep to our schedule and unexpectedly forced us to make hard data based decisions such as realising when to abandon lines of query and focus on key data — not all the data.
Creative brainstorming is an interesting thing — forced creativity is never easy. I would like to learn more techniques for generating creativity, workshops for collaborative brainstorming outside of the box and some go-to activities for inspiring ‘left-of-field’ ideas. Wake up both sides of the brain and then get them to fight while on fire.
I am proud of our hi-fi solution. It took a lot of hard work to reach this point and collaboration was key to this throughout the process. Our team worked together when it was needed and individually when necessary, but we all respected each other’s input and opinions to reach a successful outcome.