How can NHS Blood and Transplant encourage more people to give blood?
Blood giving in the UK plummeted during and after the COVID pandemic and although immediate need for blood was low, there was still a huge demand for new donors to replace those who no longer donated.
Give Blood, managed by NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT), functions as the health service’s main portal for registering new donor and booking blood giving appointments in England. As blood shortages were still making headlines, I wanted to explore how Give Blood’s new donor journey could be improved to encourage new donations.
My project plan covered:
- a content audit of the existing new donor journey
- user interviews and a usability study
- a thematic analysis of the user interviews
- a voice and tone chart
- one round of Figma concepts and prototypes
Content audit, highlighter test and blood donor interviews
Using Torrey Podmajersky’s excellent “Strategic Writing for UX” as my reference, I began by auditing the new donor journey against well-established UX writing principles such as clarity, consistency and transparency.
The audit proved a great start to the project: I soon had a list of opportunities for improving content that was often repetitive, too long or lacking in optimal calls to action. It was time to validate my assumptions with real users.
Cloze test, recall testing, good old fashioned usability testing — when it comes to evaluating content, designers are spoilt for choice. The methodology I was particularly keen to try was the highlighter test, previously used by the content team at GOV.UK.
The set-up for the highlighter test is simple enough: users are given a piece of content (often printed out, to eliminate issues caused by a digital skill gap); they are then asked to highlight text or passages that are clear or unclear, using colour-coded markers.
Outputs from the highlighter test reinforced some of my findings from the content audit: clear and descriptive page headings were exceptionally helpful in navigating the plenitude of information, and the users appreciated how easy it was to spot useful details such as the time commitment needed to make a donation.
Still, some key details about donor eligibility — such as blood type and sexual history — were either overlooked or proved confusing.
Next up: donor interviews. I knew that hearing about the experiences of existing blood donors, from their initial motivation to give blood to their most recent donation, would prove incredibly helpful in understanding how new donors could be encouraged to sign up.
Thematic analysis
I spoke to six donors with varying backgrounds and experiences: from a veteran who had given blood over twenty times to a person who only just registered to donate in the past year. I imported the interview transcripts into EnjoyHQ and sorted them into four themes:
- service principles - statements that would help form the guiding principles for Give Blood’s content
- donor concerns and pain points - statements about frustrations, worries or poor experiences faced by donors
- new donor motivators - statements about positive donation experiences which could potentially be used as motivating factors for new donors
- words and phrases - language the donors used to refer to the donation service, a good basis for understanding what phrasing to use in the registration journey
Putting it all together: service principles, voice and tone chart and first concepts
I had learned a lot — enough to put together a draft of Give Blood’s service principles and a basic voice and tone chart. These laid the foundation for an initial redesign of several steps in the registration journey, specifically the landing page and the new donor registration email, where I focused on surfacing the very personal and human motivators for giving blood, as well as clearer expectation setting and calls to action.
Time had come to present my findings to the fabulous group of fellow students at Berghs. It was a pleasure taking them through my findings and sharing the adventure of delving into this new and important domain on my first wholly content-focused project.
Summing up: it’s all about the journey
Unlike most of my work, this project was more about the process of redesigning content, rather than the deliverables and outputs which would ultimately help deliver change and shift KPIs. Still, given how much I learned