We heard a lot about empathy in UX design, in which designers had to understand end users' feelings and thoughts without having the same experience. It was crucial for us to leave all our assumptions behind to start a project like this.

The research started with interviewing potential blood donors and regular blood donors by understanding their feelings about the entire donating process, the frustration they may encounter, and the possible reasons for not going back to donate blood regularly. As a team, we sat back together and organized all these data into two different personas and user journey maps.

Note: The Personas and User Journey Maps below are made through multiple stages, which has included stages of reframing and reconsidering the scope of the project.

From the question "how we can solve the issue of low returning rate on blood donation" to a better understanding of the end-users, the team understood the reason behind the story isn't because of lack of advertising or people has lack of empathy.

What inspired us is that most donors and potential donors are willing to donate their blood and contribute to others who need help. Still, the discouragement in the donating process led them to decrease motivation to continue donating blood.

The team wants to maintain donors' motivation on helping others and also make sure every donor know their contribution has been made. Therefore, it is crucial to design the donating process transparently and engagingly.

But how? Firstly, we need to fully understand the donation system.
When donating blood, the process for donors is like walking into a clinic. Donors book an appointment, go to the blood donation centre, fill up personal health questionaries, draw blood, get a thank-you card from the staff, and go home. It is a straightforward process, but we found that donors will never know how their blood has been used. This finding inspired the team with another question.
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What can we provide to donors, while donors provide their precious blood?
We know donors are great people, and they are willing to dedicate themselves without return. So, a physical prize is definitely not the best answer to the question. We believe a big honour that would make donors proud of what they did is what they need. LifeGift wants to give donors something that represents more than a thank-you card, as well as an engaging and convenient donating experience for both donors and potential donors.

The project has a more explicit goal. But, what would be the best solution? Each of us in the team designed multiple versions of prototypes from low to medium fidelity. These prototypes are not meant for the final app design. They are used to communicate different ideas and user flow to the team and the end-users, which helped us learn from different perspectives and framed the project directly into scope with more settled and specific tasks.

Below is a feedback chart that we converted and organized from this process and a new persona and user journey map based on our new understanding of the users.

With some regular onboarding features in the app, the LifeGift App contains the following key features that intend to make a transparent donating process.

Understanding end-users’ behavior is the key
When designing a product for people that I may never get in touch with within my daily life, it is always essential to be a rational thinker. By saying that, I found it is crucial not to let my assumption take the lead. Every design decision should think based on what I learned from the end-users and come across with well-considered rational reasoning.
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User testing should never ends!
Design is a constant iteration of improving the experience for the end-user. It is crucial to constantly find ways to collect and listen to your user's feedback. For every project, designers should never forget there would be an area of improvement.