The new term "backfill" has sparked much discussion on KivaFriends recently.  Here one idea for doing away with that term and it's images of bull dozers and back loaders...  What do you think?





I am hoping these might spur some conversation regarding ways to help prevent languishing loans.  Any ideas?

Personally I almost never look at the home page, but maybe most of the people who aren't crazy KFers do most of their lending from the home page?  So anyway I tried to work up the idea to show a group of popular loans, which I titled "Recent", and then a group of "Featured" loans which would be random, weighted towards expiring.  Maybe one row in that group could be near expiring and the rest would just be random.  This should work like LendStream or the Impact This Week section, so every so many seconds a new batch of loans would appear.  Or maybe one new line and the rest move down a row.  Popularity probably doesn't change much every 30 seconds, so that section would be more stable, but the others would change regularly and that would get a lot more loans seen.

I really liked putting the country name below the pics, but maybe the little lending gauge would be better.  It would certainly fit more easily.  I never have liked having all the images greyed out the way Kiva does it now.  It just makes them harder to see...  so I put in images that are easier to see, maybe more attractive.

Home Page Prototype

This started out as just a quick prototype of how the Lend page could work to get more visibility for more loans. But really, it's more like an expanded version of the home page, with links called Search all loans that would go to the existing lend page with an appropriate sort.  I don't know if that makes sense or not, but this page isn't where you can page through every loan on the system, it shows an ever changing selection of loans designed to give equal exposure to all loans.

It's split into 3 sections:  Latest Activity would show some of the most recent loans made.  A bit similar to LendStream, but  it shouldn't show more than one loan from the same borrower.  This would highlight the diversity of lenders and borrowers and would showcase current activity. Popular Loans would display the latest loans from the popularity sort.  As shown, loan details would popup from a click on the more link. Featured Loans would display a selection of random loans and expiring soon loans.  The main thing with this section is to display an ever changing selection, different for each user. This will give exposure to the loans that currently are hidden by the popularity sort.

New Page Prototype

Someone sent me a private message saying they wanted to see more of the loan description on the Lend page so it would be easier to find loans they wanted to look into further.  I threw this one together to accomodate, and included some features I would like to see on the real Lend page.  This is where you would do searches and could page through all the loans.

Lend Page Prototype