Reasons We Have A Blood Supply Shortage – Blood Donor American Red Cross Review

Yes, there are other factors, but the following make it unnecessarily difficult and, in turn, discourage both first-time and repeat visits/blood donations. 1. The app’s preregistration process is difficult. For example, though the app and Red Cross know the full address of your upcoming appointment (after all, you are signed-in to the app and scheduled your appointment using the app or the web site, right?), the app’s preregistration check-in requires that users manually enter the zip code of their upcoming appointment. Worse, the zip code field is not the first question asked during the echeck-in process and when users leave either the app or the echeck-in process within the app (to look-up the zip code) the app makes the user start the echeck-in over again from the start, rather than where they had left-off (at the zip code field). If the app cannot auto-suggest the zip code of already scheduled appointments, then this field should be the first question asked so that users do not lose the work they have already entered when they leave and return to the app’s check-in process. 2. Scheduling blood donation appointments is unnecessarily inefficient. Among other issues, the default suggested available appointment time windows are too broad. Users must click on the various default time spans only to determine that the actual time(s) available are very limited and, typically, do not fit the user’s schedule, which then forces users to open and look through numerous other default time windows (often across several possible sites) to find an available appointment time that fits their schedule. It would be a better user experience to simply present the actual available times directly under each site and do away with the default time spans or to make the default time spans narrower and, therefore more relevant and efficient to use. 3. When donors arrive at blood donation appointments, the check person never wants to see the completed echeck-in screen in the app. This is contrary to the app’s instructions and leaves donors with the feeling that they wasted their time using the app (or at least the app’s e-check feature, which is 50+ questions and takes 15 minutes to complete). Worse, the check-in person always just wants your Donor # and, though it seems basic and obvious, the one piece of information not available on the app’s echeck-in completion screen is the Donor #. 4. Though I have the Red Cross Blood Donation app on my iPhone, the app cannot not be located when I search for “Red Cross.” Again, a 101-level user experience oversight. To spell it out , users/donors are less likely to use apps they cannot easily locate. Again, all of this is unnecessarily inefficient and makes users/donors feel like they wasted their time. None of this promotes repeat visits/blood donations. Lastly, and this is not caused by the app, the last three times I have gone to give blood, I have had to wait more than 30-minutes (one of these times I waited over an hour), even though I had a scheduled appointment. Bottom line, if scheduling, checking-in, and actually going to appointments is a waste of donors’ time and a bad experience, the Red Cross should expect to continue to see fewer and fewer donors scheduling, checking-in, and showing-up for blood donation appointments.
Review by Boston Brent II on Blood Donor American Red Cross.