Making Charities Findable
The main goal of Helpalot is to make you find your charity. The charity or charities that you are able to trust enought to give them your valuable support (time, energy, money).
While I’m setting up a structure to make sure all the charities can be included, how do I make them all findable? On my survey I ask how you would like to search, I really need your feedback to make Helpalot as easy to use as possible. At this moment ten people filled in the survey (thank you!) and it’s already clear that different people like different paths to take when they search. What are some of those paths?
The first search method would seem to be text search, including everything that’s written on a page. There are a lot of problems with this method. Sometimes the topic of a paragraph is not written down as a word. On the other hand, a lot of words are written down that are not really directly related to the charity. It just will not work.
Location
Maps of the location of persons and charities could be used. I’ve written a little bit about this on my short review on Frappr. I like to be able to use some sort of map for searching. If what you are searching for has geographic parameters you know of, this will be great. If possible, location based search should be implemented on Helpalot.
Relevant words (tags)
Tagging has proven to be successful for a lot of websites that deal with a huge amount of data. Technorati is the king on this matter. The strength is in giving the power to the user who wants their page to be found. If on a charity page a small list is made on what words are relevant, the charity should be findable. It might be difficult for a charity page owner to select the right words, hopefully the supporters of this charity will help by suggesting words.
Social network
The key feature of Helpalot will be your personal social network that you can use for searching. Find out what your friends support and see if these are the kind of charities you would like to support.
Presenting the results
Humans live in the real world where there are colors, human faces, 3D locations, movement, etc. We are used to quickly scan our environment on these kind of parameters and that’s what we are good at. In the wild we don’t see a lot of text, so I’ll try to present the information as visual as possible in ways that match how we think. The user shouldn’t need to learn how an interface works, but the interface should be made as to interface best with a user.
For this reason I’d like to present the search results with emoticon like icons. It’s simple; a happy face, means the charity is doing good. There is more information that could be added to this icon, like a representation of the number of supporter the charity has. I’m working on the details of how to design these icons.
Riya for inspiration on search
To state the obvious; Helpalot is not the first project that deals with search. So let’s take a look at what can be done to find pictures for example. If you have the patience you can listen to over 30 minutes of talking about Riya, a picture upload program and website with facial recognition. This to make it easy for you to get an overview of your 1000+ pictures you have on your hard drive.
It’s interesting to hear how they don’t only focus on the face for facial recognition. They include other contextual information like the color of the shirt. Because if there are two pictures, taken three minutes apart, and both have a person with a green shirt, this might be the same person. It’s a simple idea (using complex algorithms), that’s just brilliant. I love this kind of out of the box thinking.
Use the context for better search
In general, I always think that when you have a problem, it helps to take one or more steps back, zoom out a little. In the case of Riya it’s literally zooming out to take more information into account while making a guess on who’s in the picture.
In the search process it’s important to order the results on the likelihood of relevance. Expected trustworthiness will probably be important, but their might be other factors that need to be taken into account. For charities I already wanted to take into account the social context in the search. Perhaps I’m still missing something in the context that can increase the findability of charities. What more of the context can I include? How can I zoom out on this problem?
As a way of brainstorming let me just shoot some ideas. Could this information be relevant for quality evaluation and/or the findability of charities:
- The age of the charity owners and/or supporters?
Search using the age of the supporters was in one of my early plans, what does it say if a young person owns a charity? - What schools the charity owners/supports went to?
Are highly educated people more effective in their realizing their charity mission? Do you have extra trust if someone went to your old school? - How well the person/charity is logistically connected?
Does living near a port, big city, highway vs. living on a rural area with a difficult connection to the rest of the world matter? - The type of internet connection?
Does a dial-up means no money goes to fancy stuff or simply that’s the charity is not professional? - Would you want to surf on impatience?
If you reveal impatient behaviour in the way you interact with the site, should the interface be made simpler?
These are just ideas for now. For my test version the relevant words (tags) and the social network will probably be the main search methods, but what are your ideas, how can we zoom out for a better picture to help you find your charity?