Academics:   Master of Science in Information Management

Search is a critical activity for finding information. Websites that employ search functionality can gain a better understanding of their users’ information needs by analyzing a user's queries: search logs are the “holy grail” of users’ search behavior. However, the sheer size and complexity of search logs make them difficult for manual analysis and interpretation.

This project implements different algorithms to analyze search logs. An AOL query log with ~20 million queries that were generated from ~65,000 users was used to develop these methods. An application was also built to help visualize these methods and their differences.

The local Council of the Boy Scouts of America possesses needed materials for newly appointed unit leaders to on-board effectively and begin providing value to the organization and the boys they serve. Unfortunately, between the current word-of-mouth communication structure and the prohibitive costs of widely distributing hard-copy training materials, many unit leaders struggle just to keep an ad-hoc program running, and often do so well below BSA standards and policy.

These barriers can be removed by developing a web portal with digital copies of the on-boarding materials and an accessible, centralized calendar of local events. The portal can also refer trainees to the official BSA training systems and other external resources that unit leaders have found helpful.

UW SharePoint Service was launched by UW Technology in March 2008. For my Capstone, I created a Change Management Process to manage the change requests affecting UW SharePoint Service. This process would be incorporated in the overall SharePoint governance structure. The purpose of the Change Management Process is to improve the customers’ experience by increasing the stability and reliability of SharePoint through the review, tracking and communication of proposed changes.

The process was developed to address the following issues:

• Lack of consistent review and approval criteria for SharePoint services change requests
• Inadequate communication between groups regarding SharePoint changes
• Absence of record tracking change requests, making historical analysis difficult
• Confusion regarding whose approval was required prior to making changes

To date, Global Partnership’s information management system has consisted of an informal amalgamation of commonly used office software (Outlook, Word, Excel); multiple electronic and physical filing systems; FedEx, email, phone, and instant messengers; and the memories of individual staff. While a successful core business has been built with these readily available tools, time and resources have been lost, knowledge remains undiscovered, and relationships imperfectly managed.

This capstone project assessed GP’s knowledge management and information system needs by building on the requirements already identified in conversations with staff, and later by creating evaluation framework for the recommended CRM solutions.

Corelytics™ will automate the process of analyzing financial performance data for IT service companies (ITSCs) and will display a series of financial performance graphs. Graphs will also include “industry standard benchmarks” which will be provided by Corelytics to show the ITSCs how their performance compares to industry standards.

The project created the processes of calculating and presenting the financial data in Corelytics. This creates a common structure out of multiple financial data sources allowing, for clients to manage their finance data more effectively. Finance data mapping and roll-ups will be performed automatically, providing accurate and updated feeds to the benchmark graphs. This will free up time for clients to spend managing their core strategies of providing IT services.

The Self Service Interactive Customer Response system is an application that allows a caller to use speech commands to navigate through the menus and options offered. My client utilizes this system to help customers resolve their issues, while minimizing the number of calls that need to be transferred to a human representative.

The goal of this capstone is to create a new experience in the self-service system, supporting a new bill format type for users. The expected results are (1) to provide customers with a better-tailored experience in the self-service system; (2) to provide consistent customer service among all customer service channels; and (3) to reduce the client’s postal services and paper costs and institute more environmentally-friendly practices.

The UW School of Nursing, currently ranked the top nursing school in the country, addresses challenges in health care through global initiatives. The school has over 500 faculty and clinical staff and 900 incoming students every year spread over 16 master’s degree areas. Due to the wide variance in the study areas and audience, managing information and keeping an updated external website—the first interface to the larger community—is a huge challenge.

The Content Management System fulfills the main priority of syndication (to present content to be used multiple times in different forms for different purposes), as well as continuous migration of applications, index data, metadata and objects from older systems to new ones and usability of information.

The Seattle Youth Commons, in partnership with the City of Seattle, the YMCA, DigitalAid Inc., the University of Washington, One Economy Corporation, and other community organizations has put together a website called Puget Sound Off. The goals of the project are to increase youth participation in civic engagement; build youth technical, writing, and leadership skills; and create a trusted place where Puget Sound policy-makers can connect with Seattle area youth.

Our role in the project is that of the evaluator. We have been tasked with creating a long and short-term plan for evaluating whether or not Puget Sound Off is accomplishing the aforementioned goals.

Heartstream is a Seattle-based subsidiary of Philips Healthcare. Heartstream’s intranet has long been regarded by its employees as useless and has therefore remained obsolete. Senior management of Heartstream are eager to turn the intranet into a channel where employees can access useful information and thus serve business needs of the organization.

This project focused on identifying user requirements, structuring web architecture for efficient navigation and layout schemes, and providing design recommendations for building the improved intranet. The methodology and process focus on people, content, and technology. In this case, three results will reflect the success of my capstone: (1) attracting more users to visit the intranet; (2) a user-centered repository of organization-wide information which serves users’ needs; and (3) achieving better user experience.

A group sale is a special sale where discounted prices are available when a minimum amount of products are purchased. Although many people are aware of group purchase as a way of saving, our research showed that group purchases have been neglected due to the difficulty in forming purchase groups.

To address this problem and bring out the potential market, we proposed the GroupSave website, a platform for both group purchases and sales. With GroupSave, people who don’t know each other can form online purchase groups and get discounts individually. Sellers can also gain satisfying profits by selling in bulk. The design specifically addressed issues such as trustworthiness between buyers and sellers as well as within buying group, and group purchase/sale logistics.

Personal safety is always and issue, whether in the wilderness, on the road, or in the urban or suburban landscape. However, unique to this time in technology development is the opportunity to do something new about this old problem.

HomeSafe is a Facebook application that allows users to provide details of where they are going, what route they are taking, and when they expect to check back in to the system. I employed a variety of usability tools and techniques to solicit user needs, preferences, and values. Rigid adherence to the canon of usability methods was not as effective as a less structured, organic, even Zen approach to HomeSafe, and yielded more finely tuned insight into my user group, and better functionality.

TalentSpring is a unique employment resource, successfully getting users’ resumes read by the employers other web services are not able to reach, and helping candidates track interested employers.

For my capstone project, I redesigned TalentSpring’s ‘My Activity’ features to improve the user experience for our candidates. One of the major objectives was to demonstrate to job candidates that TalentSpring can attract many of their ideal employers. This was accomplished by providing improved functionality whereby users can track all the interaction their resume generates, as well as messages from potential employers and interview offers, on the main ‘My Activity’ page.

The Edmonds Community College Human Resources website is the front door of the centralized information system for job seekers to register and search for jobs at ECC. The goal of this capstone was to redesign and enhance the existing information system of the site in order to improve its usability.

After background research on other HR sites, a content inventory on the existing site, interviews and focus groups with HR staff, and a user analysis, I created a paper prototype and presented it to the users for the usability testing. At the end of the project, a final prototype was created and submitted to ECC Human Resources.

Information gathering, development, storage and retrieval are primary duties of intelligence departments, including the Human Resource department of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey. In this department, the most important goal for management of the department is to save, share and transfer the knowledge necessary for knowledge management, in order to boost productivity, efficiency and data quality and integrity.

A custom-designed information system can be an answer to all of these goals. In order to design such an information system, an audience analysis and organizational information audit were conducted. Based upon the findings of this analysis and audit, a prototype system was designed.

Launched in 2003, WebJunction is a national online portal for information, resources, and community spaces serving library professionals. After building a thriving site and loyal user base, WebJunction is currently revamping existing services. The relaunch will introduce a new technology platform with fresh features, dramatically different interface design, and improvements in social networking capabilities.

In order to preserve the liveliness of the community throughout the change, this capstone aimed at creating user engagement with functionality on the new site. An initiative that explains the scope of the refresh and basic procedures for using features can help minimize growing pains, as long as it also makes explicit the benefits of participation. This can only be achieved with a user-centered perspective that encourages exploration and discovery.

The users of Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) suffer from an explosive growth in the number of the records in the system. Over 1 billion patient records have been stored, requiring great efforts to locate and read individual notes.

The simulator is an easy-to-access web application to address user needs in the diverse forms of note presentation, so that CPRS can be improved for more effective and efficient note reading. The initial design is based on the note-reading needs of the targeted population. The simulator collects user responses to questions associated with a list of notes in various forms. Graeco-Latin square and conjoint analysis assure the design’s impartiality. Finally, the system provides a note evaluation collection to inform future improvements.

Our Capstone project consists of the information architecture for the redesign effort being undertaken by the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) for courts. wa.gov. A metadata schema and navigation scheme were developed from content audits and user and stakeholder analysis. Through user centered design methodologies, the overall layout of the site was improved to provide better user experience. Finally, the recommendations were tested with a prototype and a final design plan was submitted to the AOC.

Spottago is a start-up firm based in Seattle, founded by four students from the University of Washington in 2007. Spottago is a map-based college housing website that is committed to making the college housing search process as easy as possible for students.

Adopting the role of a strategy consultant, I analyzed Spottago’s vision/future strategy and devised recommendation frameworks that propose future strategic initiatives the organization should undertake to scale up its operations and market presence on an enterprise level. Integrating findings about the users, competitors and the industry through various research methods, and relationships between the functional and business components of the service were modeled to provide further insights for Spottago to shape its vision and strategy.

The Chamorro language is declining rapidly, particularly amongst those post-WWII Guamanians and Chamorro people between the ages of 18 and 54 years old. Their parents speak Chamorro very well, but they do not. If they have children and live in Guam, their children benefit from mandatory Chamorro language courses in public schools. The result is that this “lost generation,” unable to speak fluent Chamorro, perpetuates the breakdown of language transfer from one generation to the next.

This capstone is a pilot project that leverages technology to preserve the Chamorro language by understanding the information needs of the “lost generation.”

Oracle Fusion Middleware is a portfolio of over 30 standards-based software products, including J2EE and developer tools, identity management, and business intelligence. The documentation for these products is delivered to customers as a library of books in PDF and HTML formats, and in online help for various software products. With no federated search mechanism or single “window” into the information, customers cannot easily find the answer to a specific problem or question.

A content strategy that engages author stakeholders was developed, beginning with a pilot implementation of a common information repository. With a successful pilot and jelled team, the organization can migrate content over time, according to business needs.

Web Collective, a small, ambitious web development firm, wants projects of larger scope, more complexity, and more client interaction. Since Web Collective is a new company, the processes are not formalized yet. No two projects are run the same way. The goal of this capstone is to analyze the information and process flow of the company, to suggest a consistent framework for managing projects.

Currently there has been no research done on best practices for video game demos. The current generation of game consoles allows for quick and easy distribution of demos to a large market of targeted consumers. This makes the value of free downloadable demos extremely high from a marketing standpoint.

Our capstone project delves into video game demos by watching and interviewing users as they play various demos, to discover their likes and dislikes. In addition to interviews, we created and distributed an online survey as a supplemental data source.

The goal of our research is to come up with a list of best practices for game studios to use when creating demos. We also created a set of personas from the 15+ participants we interviewed.

The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2000 was intended to solve voting problems like those that occurred in Florida during the 2000 Presidential election. However, the systems that were implemented to solve the problems have only exacerbated the issues of voting security, privacy and auditability. This project examines the security issues with electronic, touch-screen DRE voting machines; evaluates the current method of voting in Washington State and makes recommendations on maintaining trust in the voting experience while providing efficient and secure elections.

Risk is inevitable within business environments. Taking and managing risks is part of what organizations do to create profits and shareholder value. Enterprise risk management enables management to effectively deal with uncertainty and associated risk and opportunity, enhancing the capacity to build value.

With this in mind, this project aims to assist University of Washington partners in Asia that are now entering the global market. Enterprise Risk Management will allow these organizations to develop controls and mitigate risks such as social, political and cultural issues. This framework was developed to be used as a guide and can be manipulated to cater to any business needs.

Homeless young people (age 13-25) and service agency staff/volunteers need better access to information provided via printed materials, like brochures and fliers. Young people rarely use the present displays without assistance, and present ad hoc organization frustrates service providers.

Fifteen categories were identified and incorporated into three design prototypes for displays: fixed (slat wall), itinerant (rolling case), and mobile (InfoBike). Videos based on use scenarios that depict typical user interactions with these prototypes were shown to homeless young people and service provider staff/volunteers and proved to be a useful probe for eliciting user feedback. The InfoBike was given the highest ratings and generated the most discussion among users. Future work will incorporate these solutions into working displays at service agencies.

Currently there is no storage/retrieval system in intercollegiate athletics that can provide sufficient data analysis regarding institutional hiring patterns and the movement of people from position to position, school to school, conference to conference, and across geographic areas. Approximately 20 years of athletic department personnel data exists in paper-based directories and a few electronic files. The directories contain information on every athletic department staff, administrator, and coach involved in intercollegiate athletics in two- and four-year institutions in the United States and Canada. The directories are updated annually, providing a rich data source for individual career and institutional hiring. The purpose of this project is to build a storage/retrieval system for running queries related to the movement of individual administrators and institutional hiring patterns.

The ancient beauty of Buddhism in the Tibetan culture spilling out into the world shares something important in common with the new science of user-centered design—a recursive process leading to the benefit of others. This ongoing photographic exhibit documents a more than 1000 year-old tradition, a Tibetan Buddhist ‘Wong’ or formal empowerment into highest yoga tantra religious practice. Communicating about a vibrant and esoteric religious culture reveals increasingly deep levels of understanding, yet this culture and information becomes easier to approach and understand with design iterations that interact with the viewer. Written and visual information create effective facets by interacting with end users in the planning and ongoing stages—using surveys, tagging-term matching, comments, discussions, structure, interactivity, use trends, pattern-detection, and incorporating changes.

With its patient-centered perspective and personalized online tools, Group Health’s member portal supports retention and growth in the health care organization. However, over the past few years, the portal has not changed how users find information or access fundamental tools. One of the most used sites on the portal, the provider directory, is hampered by a cumbersome user query process that can stop or slow visitor and member experience. This capstone project proposes a robust provider directory using mashup technology and more streamlined backend processes to deliver medical center and physician information to both members and nonmembers. The enhanced directory will improve member online experience, leverage the current technology platform, and support strategic business goals through convenience, accessibility, and more visible representation of information.

Search Engines are evolving and growing to be a direct response vehicle for advertisers, offering them the ability to optimize sales by targeting the relevant advertisements to searchers. After conducting an information need-based segmentation of AOL search data, we revealed patterns of query progression in the information seeking process of searchers that fit consistently into the four stages of the standard offline sales funnel: awareness, research, evaluation and finally the decision stage. If advertising is optimized according to the searcher’s position in the funnel, while honoring users’ anonymity, marketers can leverage that information to launch sequential, targeted, optimized and effective messaging campaigns.

The trucking industry is facing a crisis. High diesel fuel costs have led to nearly 1,000 trucking companies going bankrupt in the first quarter of 2008. Driver satisfaction is very low and trucking businesses struggle to attract and retain qualified drivers. Every day truckers must struggle against many barriers of productivity and profitability.

This capstone project focused on a next generation navigation system designed specifically for truckers. Navigation will only show truck routes matching the type of truck and load. Finding the lowest available fuel will help save money. Optimal routing based upon traffic conditions will improve driver performance, saving both time and fuel. Integrating applications to reduce paperwork will streamline business processes and improve driver satisfaction.

The crucially important role of search engines in Web use and e-commerce is becoming clearer every day, but relatively little is known about actual search usage patterns, and ways to improve users’ experiences. This project focused on analyzing three large Web search log data sets, two from 2006 from AOL and Microsoft Live containing a total of over 61,000,000 records, and a Microsoft Live data set from 2007 containing over 108,000,000 records. The findings revealed that a surprisingly large number of searches lack sophistication and basically use the search engines as surrogate bookmark holders. There is clearly room for improvement if people are to use these extremely powerful tools to their full advantage.

Any employee joining a new organization is expected to learn and adapt quickly to their new environment and be productive in a certain amount of time. This process generally depends on the employees’ abilities and on the new organization’s disposition on knowledge sharing. The abundance of data can be extremely overwhelming. Focals tend to keep their knowledge and information to themselves, believing that their value to the group rises in proportion to the amount of tacit knowledge that they have accumulated. For the Company Enterprise Data Retrieval System (CEDRS) organization in Boeing, we have created a tool whereby newcomers can view all the tasks, forms, processes, people, and artifacts pertaining to the organization, which will help them adapt quickly in the organization.

A company intranet can be an essential information tool when designed with user needs in mind. This poster presentation of an intranet redesign project at a 200-person interactive design agency highlights the process of researching user needs, aligning these needs to organizational (“business”) goals, and extracting key strategies for building a highly-useful and highly-usable intranet.

WeCare is a social networking platform on the internet, intended exclusively for community giving and care. WeCare is donor-driven and offers tools to assist potential donors to connect with each other in smaller virtual communities (VCs) over a large network.

Unlike the large non-profit organizations, WeCare is targeted at donors in trusted domains, and with smaller contributions. WeCare enables the donors to unite to multiply their contribution power in helping people. Donors will also identify beneficiaries and will nominate them in their VCs to receive assistance. VCs will democratically choose one beneficiary amongst the nominations to receive funds. The donors in this virtual community will be accountable for appropriate use of donations.

A file system is a method of storing data, usually thought of as either local or networked. Typical file systems use a table of metadata, or in advance cases, a relational database to organize files. However, there have been some investigations regarding benefits of XML in storing and structuring metadata because of its openness and platform independence. This project explores research and implementations of XML for next-generation file systems, with the goal of making recommendations for scalability, extensibility, and interoperability. Particular attention is given to use of XML format for long-term preservation of digital resources. This project was inspired by folksonomic tagging using del.icio.us, which raised the question, how can local files be tagged? Pros and cons of XML tagging of files are discussed.