Getting Addicted to Needles (In a Good Way)

“I don’t need all this blood,” I thought to myself while sitting on my couch during a Friday off from work. I used to donate blood semi-regularly before college, but it was something I had regretfully forgotten to do after completing that life transition. A search led me to an American Red Cross (ARC) pop-up blood drive with an appointment available that day. As fun as that story is, the interesting thing was what happened after I poured out a pint of my crimson fluid.

Three days after I got the needle I received an email welcoming me to the Red Cross with an official donor card that I could access through the Blood Donor App. Knowing I would give again, I figured the app would help make scheduling my next appointment easier when the time came. I was pleasantly surprised to see it did a lot more than that.

Blood Donor App

Blood Donor, or Blood Donor American Red Cross on iOS, has had over five million downloads and contributes to over 200 thousand appointments every month. The email I got about my donor card said that the app allowed me to, “schedule [my] next donation, keep a record of [my] blood pressure and track [my] donation on its way to a hospital." Sounds good enough, count me in.

The app was developed by 3 Sided Cube whose mission is to change millions of lives for the better using technology for good. Blood Donor won a Webby in 2016 for Best Health App.

Wearing my business goggles, it was easy to see that the goal of the app is more than to provide a convenience. It exists to make donating blood a habit.

Key Players

The stakeholders in this situation are the American Red Cross, donors, and those that need donations.

The ARC, a nonprofit that provides a range of services from disaster relief to lifeguard training, supply approximately 40% of America’s blood supply. Its number of donors has fallen 40% over the past 20 years in the US with the Red Cross declaring an all-time low in January of 2024. This drought is attributed to COVID-19 and changes in in-person engagement. In addition to whole blood, they collect double units of red cells, platelets, and AB plasma.

Donors are the people who go out of their way, spending as little as thirty minutes and as many as several hours to have their liquids pumped out of their body so they can be transferred to some stranger whose life depends on it. I came up with two primary personas in this category with two different motivations. There is the person who donates primarily for the feeling of giving and making a positive impact and the person whose main motivator for donating is the financial incentive.

The last group of stakeholders are those that need the donations. These are the patients whose lives depend on them, but more so the community blood banks and hospitals whose job it is to make sure there is enough of a reserve for the patients that need it. Assuming you are in reasonably good health right now, you probably don’t spend a lot of your free time thinking about how much compatible blood is available at your nearest emergency room. Because of how fast a dependence on these resources can be created, it is the hospitals and blood banks that the burden of campaigning for donations falls onto.

App Design

The app uses the ARC color scheme with the appropriate proportions according to the brand’s guidelines. Notifications are sent to users through the app and emails alerting them of the ability to donate, donation shortages, and rewards for donating. This triggers users to launch the app.

As soon as the app is opened there are two calls to action. The first is to book an appointment similar to the last donation and the second is to redeem points for rewards. These are the two most common actions you would expect a user to make in this app which makes this placement tactful. Scrolling down reveals options to schedule a different type of appointment, see your donor card, track your donations, review your health history, etc.

Some “rewards” like the juice box and chips you get when you’re finished are guaranteed. Other rewards vary by donation, changing depending on current demand, donation type, time of year, and previous donations. Examples of this include gift cards and ARC memorabilia like shirts and bags.

Users get invested not only through the points they can exchange for rewards, but with badges. Badges are awarded based on donation type, number of donations, time of year given, and communicating about donating online. The last category both spreads awareness and forces users to identify themselves with donating which holds them to be consistent with their actions and repeat their behavior. These rewards are given out in rapid succession as users first start to donate but then become harder to earn as time goes on. The more time and effort they put into earning these badges, the more valuable they become for donors.

Users can also join a team that tracks how much of an impact a group makes and gives users the opportunity to identify with a group of people and invite others to do the same. A team can be a company, school, or any other group of people as long as it is not deemed inappropriate or offensive.

The best part of the app, in my opinion, is how well it follows the Hook Model to make blood donation habitual. It's a great example of how design principles can be harnessed to encourage positive behavior. Rather than encouraging spending more time on a social platform or to buy a new shoes, this app hooks users into saving lives.

Conventions it Breaks

This app breaks some design conventions. The settings are accessed through a settings option on the first page instead of through at the top of the screen or clicking the profile icon. This improves touch accessibility but can make discoverability harder especially since clicking the profile button takes the user to a profile settings page that's also accessible though the other settings button.

The app also has different names and logos between iOS and Android. As mentioned earlier, the app is called Blood Donor American Red Cross on iOS but just Blood Donor on Android. Blood Donor is the name used in all online material I have seen online. The iOS logo has a white background and says American Red Cross while the Android one has a dark grey background and just has the ARC logo. The discrepancies probably have something to do with differences between the storefronts and were likely not intentional. 

Potential Changes

There are a couple of minor changes I would make to the app that I believe would improve the user experience. There is an AB Elite Donor badge that you earn by donating AB Plasma. Because less than 5% of the ARC donors have AB blood, this makes the badge unachievable for the majority of users and could dissuade them from getting invested in the system. On the subject of badges, sorting the seasonal ones by the time of year could also make them more discoverable to users and incentivize them to donate. A progress tracker within badges or showing the total completion could also get users more motivated.

I have not seen any utility for the profile picture. To be honest, I didn’t even notice that there was a profile picture until I started dissecting the design. I would remove this from the banner and reserve it for the donor card and settings so that the “Schedule an Appointment” button is visible when the app loads in. There could be some data driven reason for including it that I am not aware of.

A problem I’ve had when using the app was with the “Book Another Like This” button that is the first thing you see after the ARC animation. As it implies, it automatically takes you to where you select an appointment to donate whatever your last donation was. What I wanted to do after clicking that button was edit the type of donation, for example switching from platelet to red blood, but I had to scroll down past 44 results to make that change. I found that clicking refine in the top right corner also allowed me to do that but that affordance wasn’t obvious to me. I thought that refine would have helped me edit the date or location, not change the appointment type. I think edit would be a more appropriate name for that button.

Final Remarks

I wrote this article for two reasons: to showcase how design principles can be used to create positive behavior and raise awareness for blood donation. I found the app personally inspirational as it reminded me why I love technology so much. It has the capability to do good when used correctly. After installing Blood Donor and seeing that I could already donate platelets instead of waiting months to donate blood again I booked an appointment. That’s one donation that wouldn’t have happened without this app.

Do you know what is used as a replacement whenever there isn’t enough of these resources? Nothing! There is no artificial substitute or algae that produces the human syrup floating around everyone's body. I wanted to conclude with a request to consider donating. It’s like sitting on the couch at home except there is a needle in your arm and a nice phlebotomist offering you snacks and a blanket. Of course, if you have religious or health constraints then it perfectly understandable to not participate, but for those that are able, please consider it. At the risk of sounding ageist, from all the times I have donated, excluding the times I brought friends or donated at a college, the other people donating were significantly older. The number of donors keeps decreasing and it's up to the rising generations to adopt this behavior to fix that. The Blood Donor app can only do so much. If it were me that needed the blood, I would be pretty pissed off to find out I might die waiting because too many people couldn't bother.