The problem (and opportunity)

The NHS requires 1.45 million annual blood donations (5,000 daily) to meet patient needs. A significant issue is donor ineligibility, due to factors like recent tattoos, travel, or health conditions, leading to wasted appointments, staff time, and donor disappointment. Our goal was to redesign the NHS Give Blood digital experience, enabling potential donors to quickly determine their eligibility and minimise on-site rejections. This complex problem demanded a user-centered, evidence-based approach.

My role

As a UX/UI consultant, I played a key role throughout the project's lifecycle (Discovery, Alpha, and early Beta).

Discovery

• Conducted research activities, including stakeholder interviews and on-site research with staff and donors.

• Concurrently led a redesign of the Give Blood ‘Check you can donate’ tool.

Alpha

• Facilitated ideation workshops with NHS product team and stakeholders.

• Rapidly explored potential solutions, and ran concept playbacks with wider team.

• Developed low- to mid-fidelity prototypes, handling both the UX and UI design.

• Supported user-testing sessions to test key assumptions and gather user-feedback.

• Presented learnings and findings to stakeholders.

• Repeated this cycle over the course of three monthly sprints, each time iterating on previous learnings.

Beta

• Supported the NHS product team in prioritising next steps based on Alpha’s findings.

• Designed high-fidelity NHS Design System compliant designs for developers, and worked with them through to release.

The project

I played a lead role in helping design and test solutions to this complex problem.

Over the course of six months, moving through Discovery, Alpha, and the start of Beta, our multi-disciplined team worked in multiple sprints to strategically test and learn about our users, their pain points, needs and desires, and ultimately, potential solutions.

We constantly worked transparently and in collaboration with a large number of NHS stakeholders, teams and specialists, ensuring our solutions aligned with their expert understanding and experience.

I led design activities, working in tight time limits and with complex parameters to create possible (and feasible) solutions that we could then test with donors. I also ran co-creation workshops, ensuring we gathered as much inspiration as possible from our multi-disciplined colleagues and stakeholders.

Having ideated potential solutions at a high-level, I then ran concept reviews and revisions with NHS stakeholders, ultimately leading to turning these ideas into mid-fidelity prototypes.

All my work aligned with the NHS-Gov Design System.

We then tested these interactive prototypes in multiple iterations with donors, learning more and more about their needs and what would work well.

At the end of Alpha, we had tested a wide range of possible solutions for how we might minimise donor on-site deferrals, and increase donor preparation ahead of their appointment. We had learned a huge amount, from what new and existing donors would respond well to, what their expectations and levels of understanding were, and subsequently what would have the biggest impact on improving on-site eligibility.

The NHSBT team were incredibly happy with our work, and quickly began building our solutions to bring them into existence and start having an impact.