Individuals interested in donating blood can now use smartphone technology to schedule their donation appointments, thanks to a user-friendly app developed by B-Three Solutions.

This was one in a series of projects completed by B-Three for the client, a large non-profit organization in the healthcare field, with a significant presence in three major metropolitan areas.

The smartphone app represents the latest stage in the smooth and logical evolution of the online appointment-scheduling options that have been developed by B-Three and made available to the blood donors served by the client firm.

The first of those online options was a website created by B-Three for scheduling of donation appointments. The website was well-received by blood donors, and that success prompted the client firm to have B-Three expand the website.

The next stage provided additional options for scheduling appointments. B-Three enhanced the website, so that it could be deployed on a kiosk or accessed via iPhone.

Most recently, the client firm decided to tailor an appointment-scheduling option specifically for the rapidly growing number of smartphone users. Developers from B-Three worked closely with client personnel to define the core functions of the app.

This team faced the challenge of creating an app that would operate consistently across multiple deployments, with each deployment optimized to meet the needs of a specific metropolitan-area operating unit. Although a single server would handle all the deployments, the metropolitan areas were located in two different time zones.

The app would be developed into two versions, one for iPhone and one for Android.

In development of the iPhone version, B-Three personnel demonstrated flexibility in acclimating to the Apple ecosystem, including Mac OS X and Xcode. The app itself was written in Apple’s Objective-C programming language.

For the Android version, the developers utilized Android Studio to create the app, which was written in Java.

Once the core functionality was in place, extensive testing by client personnel produced a list of additional features to enhance the experience of smartphone users.

As soon as the app had been rolled out to the public, it became an important source of appointments.