We Are Blood
UX Research & Website Design, 2019
Project Abstract
Description | We Are Blood (WRB) is a local blood donation service provider. I worked in a team with two other designers to develop and facilitate qualitative UX research with a sample size of 16 users, stakeholders and subject matter experts, to understand how first-time and repeat donors experience the company’s mission statement. I worked to process that data using method affinity diagramming (a synthesis technique) to find opportunities for innovation and/or points of friction in their processes, then created shareable deliverables for the client to use internally at WRB.
Findings | There are three stages in the donation process where phlebotomist, the service provider have the greatest opportunity to engage and encourage first-time donors to come back as a repeat donor.
Results |
I worked with my team to develop these design criteria, then used then to create a design ideation workshop with the client.
Here, the client and I are sharing and sorting our design ideas.
Project Brief
This project began as a student assignment. My team and I were given the challenge to find a client working in the social impact space with 2-50 employees, do design research, and convince the client to pay us $1000 for our work. My team and I successfully connected with and convinced We are blood (WrB) let us into their world and do interaction design research work.
We are blood is a local blood bank providing blood donation services, and suppling blood to medical facilities in and around the Austin, TX area. They had recently rebranded when we contacted them and were looking at ways to build on the rebranding momentum and get their new mission statement and image to resonate with the young adult population, a group who are historically less involved with regular blood donation, all while maintaining a good rapport with their existing donors. In the sections to below, I’ll be describing my role in bringing this project together.
For this research project, I set out to understand how We Are Blood’s current donors experience WrB’s mobile donation service, how they relate to the company’s new mission statement, as well as to find points of friction and areas of opportunities to re-engage repeat and first-time donors alike.
The project strategy & methods included:
conducting user research by contextual inquiry
storytelling, slide deck building, and presentations
synthesizing by affinity diagraming and service slicing
developing design criteria for user-centered design
walking the client through a design ideation workshop based on the design criteria developed.
Main Challenges
Creating an Engaging and Valuable Solution For an Mildly Interested Client
We started this journey offering to do free work for a voluntary $1000 payment at the end of the project. But how does one convince another to pay for a process that is typically invisible to anyone who is not doing the research work themselves? To address this challenge, I worked with my team to create slide decks at each phase of the project, shared the our findings and stories from the field, and to gather their feedback to ensure that we understood their needs .
Undefined Problem & Focus
This project began without an explicit problem or focus defined by the client. The first challenge was to establish a research focus, providing a skeleton for research work to build on, to fairly represent the interest of the user as well as the stakeholder, yet not be too literal as to stifle my ability to learn and discover how people behave organically.
Results
From our insights, my team and I developed three design criteria. We used them for the next phase of design: a design ideation workshop with the client. I also worked to create deliverables the client could share internally to communicate the need for future innovations in the mobile donation department, including this website.
The findings from this method of research were compelling because the rigor during synthesis did justice to the voices of the donors using the service. I worked with my team to design and conduct a workshop for the client to share the tips and techniques on how the design criteria could be used internally for design ideation.
At the end of the workshop, the client was impressed with how each design criteria could be connected to something specific that a donor had said, and how we packaged the research in way that could be easily understood and disseminated within their organization. They were happy to pay us for the work done so far, and inquired about continued work to take these design criteria to the next stage.
Methodology
Phase 1: Project Prep
Project prep included team building and prospecting. The first challenge for my newly minted team was to find an easy to implement and reliable way for three new acquaintances to quickly research, cold call and canvas multiple businesses in Austin, and convince one of them to work with us.
I suggested and implemented weekly scrum meetings by creating shared calendars and documents to track discussions, used collaboration and communication tools to create a space for each person to have a voice and externalize their ideas, concerns, and excitement. These tools helped our team to move faster at canvasing. We successfully acquired We Are Blood as our client.
Phase 2: Research
The research method used was a contextual inquiry, a style of interviewing a user within their natural environment. As human behavior is not predictable, contextual inquiry creates an opportunity for researchers to observe unique ways people interact with one another and their environment and vice versa. It also allows researchers to ask the person to tell us what prompted them to do what they are doing. The richness of data from this method provides insight into the problems and difficulties that people automatically work through, information that can't be captured in reporting based data. The first-hand experience also serves to develop an organic empathy for your users in a way that mock or sterile environments can't. The memory of a person's nervousness, excitement, fears, or dread is allowed me to develop richer insights from the data gathered, insight that would later be used to develop a problem statement, and designed solutions for. This kinds of memory makes it possible for us as designers to advocate for the user by adding a deeper layer of understanding and empathy to user centered design.
To begin, I worked with my team to outline a research strategy in the form of an interview protocol. This the interview protocol included:
- a research focus inspired by the client's stated goals during our first meeting — to grow the organization's donor base via their mobile donation division
- research objectives to guide the purpose of interview questions
- who & how many people we'll need to interview, as well as where (the context part of contextual inquiry)
- interview questions for each type of interviewee (i.e., first-time donor, repeat donor, staff member, subject matter expert)
- activities to be used to prompts a deeper user insights that Q&A format doesn't get to
After writing up a thorough interview protocol, I went into the field with my teammates to conduct contextual inquiries, which meant following staff and donors in the field, then interviewing, observing and recording their interactions. The biggest challenge in this method is to keep up with a changing environment and at the same time, capture all the data. For this reason, we made it a point to interview in teams of 2-3 people. During each interview, we assigned roles to ourselves: facilitator, photographer, note taker, and artifact collector.
Phase 3: Synthesis
Synthesis by affinity diagraming. I worked with my team to use the data from interviews and secondary research, and my developed empathy from contextual inquiry to create a map of the client's mobile donation system. Affinity diagraming this way is a unique process in that it rigorously focuses the design-driven data on the users, producing precious resources for user-centered design.
How affinity diagramming works. After each interview, I manually transcribed the interview and created individual utterances (quotes) out of every word the participant said. These utterances were sorted into themes, where each theme represented a unique human behavior we witnessed or heard from users. Themes are then mapped based on their relationship to one another to create a map of the system, based on the interview data and secondary research my team and I did on the organization and the blood donation industry. During this time, I would talk to my teammates about curious or particularly interesting interactions we saw and explore how and why the interaction came to be. These are the kinds of conversations that generated initial design ideas, which I would write down on a post-it and keep it for later.
Synthesis by 'Service Slicing.' This method ‘slices’ a service and organizes each human interaction through four essential lenses. Each lens visualizes how a person interacts with, is impacted by, and reacts to every aspect of the service they experience.
| Service Slice Lens | Description |
|---|---|
| Behavior & Information | This looks at how behavior and information in the exchange between people & people, and people & their environment. |
| Power, Policy, Influence & Emotions | This dissects how elements not in direct contact with the user impacts the user. |
| Artifacts | This captures all the physical things involved in the system and interactions. |
| Environment | This is a map of the environment from the person's perspecive, a opposed to what I the research saw. Here we map out how people and objects move in the space. |
Using service slicing and affinity diagraming, I worked with my team to articulate three key insights on which we based design criteria recommendations to the client. From the research we found, we believe that design meeting any of these criteria would re-shape the service to meet the client's goal of creating more repeat donors. The design criteria focus the future design ideations and prototypes on the insights found from first-hand user data.
