Conversational design: Blood donation eligibility checker

Volunteer work with the Emergency Design Collective • 3/2020-6/2020 • Role: design research, synthesis, lots of writing, survey creation

Challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the cancellation of thousands of community blood drives, leading to intermittent severe shortages of blood. As a patient dependent on an infusion medication made from donor blood plasma, I wanted to do what I could to help with this problem.

My friend Nick Dawson connected me with the Emergency Design Collective (EDC): a group of “doctors, designers, makers, and academics working on future problems and right now solutions to the global pandemic.” A small core team within the EDC formed around the topic of blood donation, with an intent to use our design skills to learn about and help with the current blood donation problem.

Team

This was a super fun team to work with: Abbe Don (healthcare design leader), Katie Kirsch (accomplished designer and design instructor), Jess Hawkins (medical student/designer), Ben Alpers (design researcher), Anya Greenberg (medical student), Hope Schwartz (medical student), Bianca Pasternack (graphic designer), Josh Feler (doctor and designer), Kevin Jiang (engineer)

Process

Discovery

Our team spent a week learning more nuanced detail about the blood shortage problem. Team members spoke to blood service organizations, recruitment experts. donors, and people who are new to giving blood. We also analyzed social networks to learn more about how people talk and feel about blood donation - especially right now.

A few research questions:

What are blood donation centers’ problems, needs and goals? What help do they want right now?
Why do people donate blood?
How do people become aware of the need to give blood?
How do people feel about blood donation right now, in a time of COVID-19?
To what extent do potential donors understand the urgent need?
How is the experience of making an appointment and giving blood? What is working, and what could be improved?

Synthesis & insights

I took all of our team’s notes and insights, transferred them into a new document, and grouped/synthesized information. Nothing gives me more satisfaction than creating order from chaos. Then, our team helped wordsmith the findings and organized the insights along the user journey. Here’s a slide from our team deck:

Based on these insights, the team put together a few key opportunity areas to address:

I helped lead the process for developing design principles to help guide our process:

I wrote up a summary of this initial discovery and synthesis process: Blood donation in a time of isolation

Ideation

Our team brainstormed potential solutions, keying off 3 primary ‘how might we’ questions:

How might we prepare new donors to be successful and know what to expect?
How might we inspire new donors?
How might we help potential donors feel safe and comfortable in every step of the donation process (such as making an appointment, arriving at the center, etc.)?

Ben helped us prioritize our favorite potential solutions, ranking them according to feasibility, impact, and whether we could accomplish it on our own (or whether we needed a partner):

I ended up helping with three projects: an eligibility checker, a blood drive playbook, and an illustrated article. Allow me to elaborate on the first.

Concept: Eligibility Checker

Our team heard a few key things that led us down this path:

Blood donation eligibility can feel unclear, confusing, and outdated, especially for fist-time donors.
It’s a bad experience to be turned away from a donation center because of an eligibility issue that you could have anticipated beforehand.
We couldn’t find any public-facing, comprehensive eligibility checkers. So we decided to create one.

Starting in a google doc, Katie, Jess and I started putting together comprehensive logic for an eligibility survey that would account for all current FDA blood donation requirements. This was very complex! And we had to balance comprehensiveness with user experience along the way. Here’s an excerpt:

Then, we moved everything into a Typeform survey and refined it. Our roles on this part of the work were approximately as follows: I did most of the writing and some of the typeform logic work, Katie was our tone and visuals expert, and Jess was up to her elbows in typeform logic and FDA requirements.

Result

Unfortunately the survey has now been archived, but it was fun to work on this conversational interface.