Plasmate

What I Did

Subject Matter Research 🗒️

Plasma donation process – transfusion

Impacts of Covid-19

"Liquid Gold"

UX/User Research/Strategy 🔍

Surveys

Competitive analysis

Persona development

User Journey development

Task-flow analysis, User flow

Branding, Visual / UI Design ™️ 📱

Visual Brand Identity Design

Product naming

Low-Hi Fidelity Mock-ups and Prototypes

The Problem ❗

At the time (early 2020), there wasn't an efficient way to identify plasma donors with high levels of neutralizing antibodies

More data needed to be collected to support the efficacy of convalescent plasma therapy

It is difficult to connect and share data among patients, labs, blood banks, hospitals in real-time

💬 Actual posts in Facebook Group COVID-19 Survivors:

Proposed Solution 🤷

Plasmate is a data collection lead generation tool for blood centers and hospitals. It would help connect and match patients and plasma donors.

Setbacks 🔙

Lifecycle of the user + uncertainties/change

Considered Blockchain – pivoted because of resources

Each state has its own mandated app for contact tracing

Data in app would contain PII + other sensitive data

Covid-19-related apps are now heavily curated by Apple + Google

The bulk of revenue = selling data to pharma, blood centers, healthcare providers

We could not control what those companies would do with the data after it is sold to them

Final Thoughts 🤔

Re: Other potential solutions – Facebook provides a platform for users to manually match plasma donors to patients (through COVID-19 Groups and private messaging). Perhaps a feature could be built within their platform for a better experience for the users who need and want to donate plasma (COVID-19 – related or not).

I worked on this project during the thick of the pandemic (late-2019/early–2020) in hopes to help in some way. Since things were changing so rapidly, especially when it came to health policy and procedures, the viability of this product declined quickly. I'm thankful to have worked on it and I've learned a lot through the process.