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A new booking system for donating blood

I’m a blood donor when I’m allowed. I seem to travel to malarial regions enough that the 6 month waiting period limits how often I can donate. But each time I’m able, and I try to book online, it’s that damn booking engine that puts me off for the most part.

Searching on blood.co.uk for your local donation center is great. It’s the step after clicking the book button that I take issue with.

The first question is: Are you an enrolled blood donor?

If you answer no, then it asks if you’d like to enrol and gives you a form to fill out. But if you answer yes, it pretty much gives you the same form. Why?

Check it out:

This is if you're already enrolled?

Anyway, that’s only the half of it. The other down side, is appointments have to be manually entered. You give them a possible two times that you’d like, and they’ll maybe give you one of those times, or something near it. I’m sure we can do better than that.

Surely it could be boiled down to:

  1. Enter Donor number
  2. Pick one of the available appointment slots
  3. Enter Email (and possibly phone number) for reminder notifications

…and you’re done.

What could be simpler than that?

Admittedly there’ll be a little more work involved to provide the staff manning the phones the ability to book appointments, as well as a listing page for the staff running the donation session. I’d also like to make it easy for people to cancel or alter appointments. But even with that, it’d still be about the simplest application I would have ever written.

I’d even build it for them for free if they’d like. Give me four weeks and they could have a system that’s clean, fast and hopefully saves them a ton of administration overhead.

It could be that I’m solving a problem they don’t have. But I’d love to see the before and after statistics of the current system compared with my more useable one.