Dating games are interactive electronic games that touch upon complex, real-world issues such as successfully navigating relationships, achieving healthy emotional intimacy, and exploring gender and sexual identities. However, conventional game tagging does not reflect the nuances of the genre or serve player information needs. To address this, we developed a taxonomy that is more inclusive of queer themes and can be adapted for both user-facing and back-end game cataloging purposes. We refined it with feedback from user interviews and industry professionals and applied it to create an online repository of dating games that serves as an information hub for players.

The pandemic affected almost every part of our lives, especially social services that were delivered in person. We conducted a longitudinal research study interviewing 20 Washington State public librarians during the pandemic and tracked how their programming shifted throughout the year. We found three main themes that surfaced in our data – job satisfaction, changes to programming, and rethinking the profession once the world is "back to normal." We plan to ultimately disseminate our findings in a published paper to help librarians learn successful programming options to meet the needs of their communities.

The fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world. A large contributor that many people buy into is fast fashion. We found that college students often participate in fast fashion due to practicality and lack of knowledge on the negative environmental and societal impacts. To raise awareness and encourage sustainable habits, we created a Google Chrome extension called Root that rates clothing brands based on their sustainable and ethical practices. Root also provides users suggestions for alternatives and more in-depth information on our ratings.

The Worcester Public Library’s intranet, or SHP, is underutilized, outdated, disorganized, and not intuitive for its users. The absence of an effective, centralized communication and knowledge-sharing platform makes it difficult for staff to access the information they need to meaningfully assist and inform the community. We delivered a two-phase consultative report to guide redesigning the SHP, detailing best practices, user research findings, a redesigned intranet concept, and change and organizational management recommendations. Our project uncovered communication deficiencies and provided the WPL with a framework for redesigning and implementing a new intranet. Improved staff communication will facilitate overall community engagement.

Over 70% of the UW Women’s rowing team struggles with overtraining every year. We built an application that helps these athletes better understand their training data, and with those insights, make better decisions to reduce overtraining. Apart from analyzing large amounts of training data, we worked closely with student-athletes and team doctors to understand the symptoms of overtraining and define rowing metrics to create a training dashboard. Our Rowing Visualizer aims to help rowers and coaches better understand the effects each training has on team performance to avoid the negative outcomes from overtraining.

The Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) is a core agency of our state government, providing a variety of personal and professional licenses and other legal documents. It manages huge amounts of data about Washington’s people and economy, and its data analysis is crucial to our legislature. However, its data governance lags behind its goals. We conducted dozens of interviews with DOL employees on how and what data they work with to craft a taxonomy and recommendations for how DOL should organize/conceptualize its data, improving efficiency and making the agency more responsive and modern, resulting in better services for all Washingtonians!

Our team worked with Adios COVID and their Partners to create a reliable and convenient resource for the Hispanic community within Washington to ultimately put more vaccination shots in arms. Our goals were to support this ongoing project by improving the features and designs that were urgently needed to be pushed on to the web page. Specifically, we focused on simplifying the user interface and providing tools through different forms of research to improve the design of every feature of the application.

Based on users’ large-scale app installation data, we established an automated process for T-mobile to segment their users and create persona labels with machine learning. This process will improve mobile advertising services. We conducted social network analysis to cluster users, did topic modeling (LDA) for apps, extracted distinctive keywords in each community with linear sum assignment to build user personas The persona is able to show multi-dimension characteristics of mobile audiences such as popular apps, genres, topics within each community.

The Microsoft Azure End to End platform team is invested in identifying an efficient way to steer revenue growth prospects and to further improve user experience as well as increase the customer retention rate. Our project involved the data validation, data quality check, metric definitions and automated pipeline building. Our analysis serves as a foundation towards data-driven decision making for customer retention. The result can be utilized to monitor the user behavior and performance in real time to provide the better service and garner customer loyalty.