Bloody Legend is a mobile app concept designed to build a community of everyday heroes: people whose simple act of donating blood helps save lives. The project focuses on making the donation journey clear, engaging, and motivating, guiding users from sign-up to booking and tracking their impact.
The experience uses a supportive, human tone and a gamified recognition system, where donors progress through hero-inspired levels based on the number of lives saved. Key features include eligibility updates, easy appointment booking, emergency need alerts, and personal impact tracking. The design aims to reduce friction, increase retention, and turn a one-time action into an ongoing habit, helping users feel connected to a larger purpose with every donation.
THE PROBLEM
Blood donation is a high-intent but low-retention behaviour. People donate once but don't return. The opportunity was to design an experience that reduced friction, created ongoing motivation, and made donors feel connected to a larger purpose over time.
RESEARCH
Competitor analysis across existing donation platforms and adjacent health apps identified gaps; particularly around community, recognition, and habit-forming mechanics that Bloody Legend could address.
DESIGN PROCESS
Starting from user flows and wireframes, I mapped the full donation journey from sign-up through booking, impact tracking, and return visits before moving into visual design, ensuring the visual language served the experience.
KEY DECISION: GAMIFICATION
I chose a level-based progression system where donors advance through hero-inspired tiers based on lives saved. Given the emotional weight of the subject, gamification felt like the right mechanism to turn a one-time action into an ongoing identity.
The core challenge wasn't the interface, it was behaviour change. Reducing friction in booking is straightforward but getting someone to come back a second and third time is a different problem.
The level-based progression system was the answer I landed on, but gamification only works when the reward feels proportionate to the action. Earning a badge for saving three lives has genuine emotional weight. If it tips into feeling like a loyalty points scheme, it loses that entirely.
What I’d love to test next is whether the hero framing empowers real donors or feels patronising. Only user testing would answer that.