Academics:   Bachelor of Science in Informatics

Wastewater districts have an obligation to protect their customers’ health, to provide support for increasing demands on their systems, and to ensure that work practices and resource allocation increase environmental sustainability. Our project focuses on a local wastewater district that operates a monitoring system built upon legacy technology. The system uses paper printouts to both report and store monitoring data. This communication medium does not provide aggregate computations or afford rapid data analysis that could potentially lead to more efficient pump station usage.

To develop a solution that improves wastewater monitoring, we conducted an iterative design process involving research methods, sketching, and rapid paper prototyping. Using web technologies, we are developing a database, web service, and user interface that integrate with the current wastewater monitoring system. These enhancements will provide web access and data storage for alarms, data visualizations, and real-time and historical reports used on a daily basis.

Every night, 1,000 to 2,000 youth in King County are homeless. Many access the Street Youth Ministries (SYM) Drop-in Center for homeless young people in Seattle’s University District. The Provide-Teach-Practice-Reflect program at the University of Washington iSchool assists SYM by providing job-seeking courses to street youth, while studying how they share information to help each other find work. One objective of the program is to create a web directory of employment resources and information, answering many common questions regarding employment issues for homeless youth.

The AveStars capstone project provides the design and implementation of the directory that Provide-Teach-Practice-Reflect needs, while involving SYM clients in the design process. By engaging clients in the criticism and design of web prototypes, and by performing usability testing with potential site users, AveStars creates a system that the intended audience will find inviting, usable, and useful.

Every year nearly 700 potential new members (PNMs) participate in sorority recruitment at the University of Washington. By the end of the recruitment week, each sorority chapter will have narrowed this list to a freshman class of roughly 30. It is common for a sorority member to talk to 50 PNMs during one round (of four) in the recruitment week. At the chapter where the system will be piloted, member opinions on each PNM were written on index cards. A small reviewing committee then typed information from the cards into a spreadsheet. To facilitate better record-keeping and decision-making, this research and design project yielded a web-based system to input and manage information during the hectic recruitment week. A web format allows components of the old system to be maintained, while adding previously unavailable functionality.

Open source software (OSS) is a significant part of the digital world with Apache running on more than 80% of web servers and Firefox used by nearly 50% of all internet users. However, studies have discovered that there is a possible flaw in their development process. Due to a lack of central authority during production, design decisions are made based upon users’ and developers’ personal opinions.Participants of OSS design discussions rely heavily on anecdotal evidence to make suggestive claims. Yet even though these claims are laden with hyperboles, they are still used as the basis for making design decisions.

Our approach to this problem is presenting hyperbolic information to discussion participants with the hope of making them aware of exaggerative claims when making judgments. We have created designs that display hyperbolic statements in different manners and have conducted a controlled user experiment to evaluate the impact of these designs.

Over the last two years over 40 million young adults went on hikes all over the United States, while volunteer organizations contributed 80,000 hours maintaining these trails annually. Despite these numbers, trail maintenance still lags behind trail use. To design a more flexible trail reporting process, this project investigates the use of crowd-sourcing, a technique through which the public helps capture and systematize large amounts of data.

Footnotes, consisting of a mobile application running on GPS enabled iPhones, allows hikers to tag "notes" with geographic location data. Different trail problems and issues are categorized, so users can easily report these when they encounter trail issues. With the ability to aggregate trail information for land managers, Footnotes is intended to expedite trail maintenance. By harnessing the hiking community through mobile reporting, a more accurate log of trail conditions can be established.

Many gamers are unhappy with gaming journalism. The current review process does not allow game journalists the adequate time or context to play a game the way a consumer would.

The purpose of Game-Cafe is to provide a place for gamers to write their own video game reviews and to evaluate games based on community opinion. We focus heavily on user-friendly design and are building our site specifically for gamers.

Game-Cafe includes a reputation system that increases the value and reliability of individual reviews. For example, consistently writing low-quality reviews will lower one's reputation, as users will have the ability to positively or negatively rate any review.

Additionally, users are encouraged to build a persona on our site through their profile. Given the information from a user’s profile and reputation, we believe that visitors will have an accurate sense of the person behind the review they’re reading.

Have you ever read a movie review and found that it was entirely inconsistent with your views of the movie? This problem exists for reviews in all sectors of the entertainment industry, especially video games. What sets the game industry apart from the others is its online community's influence on purchases of games. IGROS (Intelligent Game Review Organization System) harnesses the power and influence of this community to solve the review inconsistency problem.

IGROS is a game review site that matches users with reviewers who have similar tastes. IGROS employs the most useful features of popular social networking sites to accomplish this, such as keyword tagging and user-satisfaction rating of user-generated content. To ensure that our design met our project goals, we conducted surveys of members of our potential audience and molded our design around their feedback. The result is a unique game reviewing experience tailored to our audience.

I build upon Karen Fisher's theory of information grounds—focusing on “place” and social interaction—to examine information flow within the international community at the UW Foundation for Understanding through Students (FIUTS) Wednesday lunch. The FIUTS Wednesday lunch is a 2-hour weekly free event; anyone may come to eat and talk. To investigate how (if at all) the lunch functions as an information ground, 15 hours of observation, 15 interviews, 20 surveys, and other documentation were collected. Results showed that (1) FIUTS volunteers and organizers did not regulate information flow; (2) information targeted toward participants was negligible; and (3) most interviewees’ primary motivation for attending the lunch was to interact with others in the international community. In addition, seven non-mutually exclusive role types were identified: Sages, Adventurers, Wallflowers, Tourists, Organizers, Ambassadors, and Socialites. Findings support the Wednesday lunch being an information ground.

More and more car buyers use the internet to find their next vehicle. The cars they buy affect everything from manufacturing industries to parking lots and the environment. Under the current internet model for car searching, over a hundred web sites provide essentially just classified listing space, like a newspaper, each with a small fraction of the cars that are for sale. Consumers are left on their own, can't get a clear picture of the market, and are forced to use clumsy tools to search the one or two web sites they stumble upon. This project studied the preferences of car buyers and user behavior on search engines. Based on that, a new model was designed with every vehicle for sale made available from one simple, helpful, virtual sales person: Meta-Search. The project developed the technology to enable Meta-Search and deployed it for the general public to use on AutoFerret.com.

Car ownership in urban areas has been on the decline in recent years. Factors such as increasing costs of fuel, parking, and insurance; increased availability of public transit; and alternatives such as ZipCar and FlexCar have all contributed to this decline. However, people still often need to get places that their regular means of transport cannot accommodate, and may need to share a ride with someone. Drivers may also want to share rides, either to share the cost of fuel or parking or to use the HOV lane. MobiPool uses existing social networking infrastructure and mobile phones to connect people to rides they may need. By using Facebook’s interface to peoples’ existing social relationships and a website designed specifically for mobile devices, MobiPool lets people find and share rides with the people they already know, all from their phones.

Have you ever wondered why so many new restaurants go bankrupt? The key to a successful restaurant is effective cost management, not the quality of the food or service. New restaurant entrepreneurs may be fantastic chefs or great with people but often don’t understand the basics of cost management that are required to insure long-term profits.

Project Spinnaker addresses this problem by applying the principles of Informatics, Systems Engineering, and Cost Accounting to a Steak and Seafood restaurant. Performance modeling uses probabilities involving theoretical customer flow to represent how a restaurant would profit under various scenarios. Simple graphical models given by the performance modeling method distill underlying complexities into a form more readily understandable by restaurateurs. The selection of the most cost-effective business plan, when paired with equally important qualitative success factors, ensures the highest chance of success.

Information security is vital to the success of every organization. As the explosive growth of the Internet has driven increasing network size and complexity, building a secured computing infrastructure is an escalating challenge. The main strategy is to monitor network activities to identify attacks or abuses. This typically involves a variety of solutions and appliances including firewall, anti-virus, VPN, and intrusion detection systems. While all these devices have different functions and mechanisms, they all produce large and highly-detailed security data. A large organization network infrastructure could contain huge number of these devices in the network, making the amount of security data to be analyzed quickly overwhelming. Security visualization is one of the effective ways to comprehend large amounts of data. The challenge is to develop visual representations and a user interface that both attain and preserve a high-level contextual awareness while investigating an event’s low-level details.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a special alphabet used by linguists to represent all the sounds present in human languages, with a one-to-one relationship between symbols and sounds. We designed a software tool to help students with the memorization of the IPA through the use of a dynamically generated question set. The IPA is an ideal candidate for a computerized tool since it is a memorization activity that cannot easily be learned using traditional flashcard drills because sound is one of its core components. In addition to developing a tool that enables students to perform flashcard-style learning exercises, our project will track individual student progress and will be able to adjust the difficulty of questions being asked based on that progress.

With billions of websites at your fingertips, do you feel that any of them are designed with you in mind, any one of these sites created to suit users like you? That was the design goal adopted for the redeployment of the UW Rugby website: You. The rugby team wanted to increase their public exposure and their overall communication to better suit their users' needs. Using a combination of interviews and usability testing, the needs of the site's users were identified. Using this data, the site was redesigned, remapped, and new features were identified. With work, each item was given a priority and a roadmap created to help facilitate the changing process, putting the most hurtful flaws first to be redesigned. You’re invited to come see what happens to a website that is directed solely by user needs, hopefully becoming the number one site for rugby fans in the Seattle area.

IWhen searching for videos on the internet, users are often faced with challenges that make locating or playing their desired video difficult. Traditionally, individual video searching sites implement proprietary methods for saving videos, making it impossible to save different videos from multiple sites in one location. As a result, it can be very frustrating and time consuming for users.

The VidRack project aims to streamline this process by allowing users to search multiple video sites from one location, and create a reference to currently available video searching sites. In order to design and implement VidRack, we followed a user-centered design process, created multiple iterations of paper prototypes and conducted interviews to evaluate the overall design and clarify our survey results. Finally, we developed a fully functional web-based application that addresses user difficulties. Looking ahead to the future, there is great potential to expand the VidRack project to involve social networking.

In most major research universities, tens of thousands of students register for classes during the time span of a few weeks. With such competition, students want to be well informed about their educational opportunities. We investigated the class registration system used at the University of Washington, where students use an online system to find and register for classes. Unfortunately the registration process forces students to navigate through a series of independent pages, which can be error-prone and time consuming. To address this problem, our design solution minimizes page-to-page navigation and integrates existing tools to provide information that is more meaningful. We based our design in response to insights gained from twelve interviews conducted with UW students representing over ten majors as well as from our own student experiences. Innovations from this project provide an example to universities on how to improve systems based on student behavior and needs.

Registration at the University of Washington is a very complex and confusing process, involving hours of planning with a jumble of non-integrated tools provided by the university. Because they are uncoordinated, these tools require students to have multiple browser windows open at one time, as well as scratch paper to track course numbers, fill rates, and conflicts. We believe that by integrating existing tools and by adding a dynamic visual schedule representation, this planning and registration process can be greatly expedited. We produced a registration tool built around dynamic schedule visualization, integrating previously disjoint tools into a sleek and useful system. Each student is able to visually compose and edit their schedule on the fly, allowing them to easily see the potential schedule and any possible conflicts. Additionally, using primarily server side languages, we created a stable and cross browser compatible solution to the current UW registration preparation problem.

Playing “phone tag” to locate contacts is an outdated social model that needs improvement. Waldo seeks to create a new paradigm to locate and meet contacts in practical settings. Waldo provides the ability to quickly and accurately locate contacts and meeting places on your Windows Mobile device. Waldo provides real-time location information to contacts, as well as the ability to set waypoints from the mobile phone. Users will have the option to share any of their waypoints with their contacts. Users are able to set the program to alert them when they are within a specified radius of a contact or way point. Waldo is currently being coded, and our user interface is always undergoing improvements. We strive to create an easy to use, efficient, and secure application which utilizes GPS technology on a mobile platform. We will allow users to interact with their contacts and waypoints to simplify dynamic meetings in today’s busy world.

Recent concerns over both global climate change and one's environmental footprint have brought a renewed focus on the importance of public transportation. One way to promote the use of public transportation, such as the case of the Metro Bus System, is by making the system more appealing to commuters. This project seeks to do just that by improving the availability of information for bus trips. Interviews were performed throughout the city of Seattle with the goal of identifying problems and issues commuters have with the current bus system.

Analysis of the interviews provided support for the creation of an online bus tracking system. After designing and implementing a prototype, we assessed the ease of use and user satisfaction of features to further improve our system. Our future goals focus on extending the program to mobile platforms as well as continuous improvements in design and usability.

How do you define a “well-designed website?" Is it how it works? How it looks? The fact is that there are no clear and easy answers. The state of the web is ever changing and always evolving. Static, text-based pages are being replaced by extensive and rich user interfaces that better bridge the gap between humans and technology. Innovative approaches to user interfaces have resulted in an overall improved end user experience that builds relationships and familiarity between the user and the web. The Washington State Bar Association re-design replaces the stagnant presence of the WSBA with one that allows for accessibility, aesthetic pleasure whilst always preserving a humanistic touch. By using current best practices, documented design principles and user feedback we were able to create a hi-fidelity prototype that highlights features and changes and will redefine both the WSBA.org presence and user experience.

Transitioning from manual record keeping to electronic data entry can be challenging, even for individuals with adequate resources, such as yacht owners. Moreover, existing record-keeping technology for large vessels is difficult and cumbersome to use for tracking a single yacht. In response, Yacht to Use Less aims to bridge the gap between usability and electronic record keeping for a single yacht. The specific goal for Yacht to Use Less is to provide a simple way for yacht owners and crew to compare past fuel usage, allowing for accurate estimates when planning future excursions. These decisions will lead to reduced costs and fuel consumption, which reduces a yacht’s impact on the environment.