napkintech by andrew meyer

I’ve always had an interest in the organizational structure of nonprofits and how to scale nonprofits’ efficiency up to the standard of their for-profit counterparts.  Through my work with Stanford Nonprofits, I’ve noticed a few general deficiencies which could be ameliorated through tech solutions or better interface design, i.e. an interface for assigning and managing a volunteer workforce more effectively (see  talentpath.org exec summary for a two-page business plan summary written with two fellow students).

To me, one glaring issue always stands out when a nonprofit–or any organization really–wants you to invest time or money in them: lack of transparency.    Many nonprofits try to solicit donations through their website, but nonprofits need to craft a better user experience so that potential donors know where their money is going and how much impact their donations are making.

I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, and I have worked on a few light prototypes for improving transparency in this context at Stanford’s d.school and there definitely needs to be more work done in this area if nonprofits want to get more money in online donations.

Jakob Nielsen just made a post on his site on this very issue.  He seems to have conducted a thorough test of 23 nonprofits’ user experience as it pertains to donations.  He found that once potential donors found the “donate” button  the workflow for actually making donations was fine; however, user’s want to know how their money is being used and the nonprofit’s mission or goals.  Amazingly this stuff isn’t too apparent yet…

I hope that in the future young leaders out of college will want to work for nonprofits, especially technically-minded students who could work on these issues.  The challenge is in creating a culture where working at a nonprofit out of college is more accepted.

I was browsing through the TED conference videos, and came across MIT’s work on an augmented reality device.  Essentially, it allows you to access and manipulate data by turning any surface into a touch screen device.  Users wear a picoprojector and manipulate data using colored finger bands, which is not entirely socially acceptable, but it’s still pretty sweet.  Check out the demo here:

I’m particularly interested in the ability to project relevant and related information based on what you are looking at (whether that’s eco-stats on shopping items, or my favorite, a word cloud of someone you meet at a party).  It makes sense for this to be trasnlated to (sun)glasses where the projection isn’t public and the whole device would conceivably be more subtle.

Recently,  I co-wrote  two papers based on my research at Stanford University  and at Salesforce.com which have been accepted to the CHI 2009 conference:

1. Beyond Usability: Evaluating Emotional Response as an Integral Part of the User Experience (salesforce.com)
2. Toward an Experimental Methodology for Studying Persuasion-Based Online Security (Stanford University)

I’m presenting both on Tuesday, April 9 in Boston, Mass.  Check them out and let me know what you think at andrew@napkintech.com!