Academics:   Master of Science in Information Management

The value of information is examined via a framework of information system design, content management models, business strategy, user experience, interaction design, & information architecture—forming the basis of a User Experience Architecture story.

TQTracker is a software product produced by small Montreal-based company iSystémes. This innovative business strategy management application competes with ERP systems. The project challenge is threefold: to clarify brand identity and product value proposition via the public web site, to simplify the documentation generation cycle and costs associated with customer support, and to improve information resources available to TQTracker customers.

The story in brief: information system users were identified and, based on user-centered research methods, their needs evaluated. Iterative design/test cycles evolved into an architecture model. To communicate the complex product, content strategy including storytelling and rich media were explored. A content management system was illustrated, a phased development approach recommended, and client documentation generated.

The University of Washington Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics (DBPEDS) group serves children with special needs. Their departmental website (http://depts.washington.edu/dbpeds) is used by hundreds of doctors, patients, students, and families across the country for medical care, medical training, administration, and community agent support.

As the DBPEDS website grew in content and users, there became a need to improve to the way the information was categorized, presented, and managed. We aimed to redesign the DBPEDS website using Information Architecture techniques and design methods learned in our program. We gathered requirements, created prototypes, did a usability study, and built the new site based on the feedback. We also designed the website with consideration to special needs, and we ensured the website will be easy to maintain in the future.

This project assessed and made recommendations for the use of electronic patient documentation for CareAge Home Health (CHH). The unique requirements of the business workflow, nursing workflow and Medicare requirements gave challenge to the integration of patient care business. Guided by cognitive work analysis methodology we identified duplicate work processes, gaps and lack of knowledge and understanding of the effectiveness of electronic business processes. CHH staff validated a need for integrated workflow processes to eliminate inefficiencies in all areas of the business. Recommendations for standard dictionaries, workflow improvements and maintenance plans were accepted for implementation.

The iSchool consists of a healthy mix of individuals from full-time students to full-time professionals, making it an excellent ground for learning. However, this also means that there is a large amount of information that gets pushed onto students with hopes that this information is relevant to all students. These types of information range from job opportunities to guest lecturers and events. As a consequence, the most common complaint to the iSchool’s IT department regards what has become known as “iSchool Spam”.

This capstone looks at the interaction and social implications of the current state of information distribution at the iSchool. Here, I compiled and analyzed the students' complaints and have determined ways to help mitigate some of the information overload with a list of best practices, and the testing of a service widely requested by iSchool students.

Tecnológico de Monterrey is a private university system with academic centers in many regions of Mexico. Alumni are organized all over the world in “Ex-a-tec” Association chapters that have the goal of carrying out Tecnológico de Monterrey’s mission of community service. As part of this mission the university offers scholarship programs, one of which allows alumni to sponsor students through its prestigious “Red de Filantropia” (Philanthropy Network) program.

Currently this process is done manually and with plenty of redundancy for the program administrators and donors and is geared towards users that reside in Mexico. This Capstone involves improving and streamlining the process via a web-based information system designed for donors who reside both locally and abroad.

A system specification and a prototype were developed by understanding the business processes and the end user needs, through working with the Seattle Exatec chapter and the program administrators in Monterrey, Mexico.

When King County Department of Transportation moved from displaying road closures on their website in a text-based format to a map, new problems emerged. Suddenly it became obvious that King County had no knowledge of—and no ability to display—road closures on City, State, or Federal roads within its borders. Constituents complained. To solve the problem, we facilitated an initiative between KCDOT and Washington State DOT to develop a common data format for road closures, based on national standards, using standard data formats such as XML. We initiated conversations with city transportation departments to further extend the reach of the system, thus giving constituents, truckers and emergency response personnel a complete view of county-wide road incident information.

The Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) is an information repository managing a variety of articles of technical research supporting the entire Department of Defense (DoD). DTIC desires to have the capability to directly go from an article of interest to any of the articles used as references within the system and also be able to directly locate an article that referenced the original article (citation analysis) and quickly link to the article(s). The team, working with DTIC staff, performed a user needs analysis based on survey results and interviews to develop a proposed data structure, process change analysis, and prototype web site redesign. Working directly with Parity Computing an automated reference linking process and Migration plan was developed to support DTIC’s goals.

This project develops instructional materials to integrate the FAIR (Factor Analysis of Information Risk) Risk Taxonomy with the newly released ISO 27005 Standard on Risk Management. The Target Audience is Risk and Systems Analysts who are familiar with the ISO standard but without prior knowledge of FAIR. The Cookbook will be used initially at the Boeing Co. and later made available to the Infosec community. The work was performed in cooperation with representatives of The Open Group (TOG) on Risk Management, the Boeing Co. and the original developers of FAIR: Risk Management Insight.

ISO 27005 provides a framework for organizational risk management without a detailed methodology to quantify risk. FAIR provides a logical and rational taxonomic framework to analyze and evaluate information security risk. Integration of FAIR into ISO 27005 fills the gaps in the ISO Standard which provides only guidelines for risk assessment, and compliments the ISO Standard.

The capstone project utilized Soft Systems Methodology with ongoing research, diagrams, and analysis to address issues facing small photo agencies. Shifts in the photo industry demand that providers remain dynamic while managing reliance on vendors. Through a needs assessment and analysis it appears that a locally hosted implementation of a Content Management System (CMS) could maintain and enhance media management processes.

This is an alternate scenario to storing data in the virtual cloud, though could be used in conjunction with such an archive. Key functionality related to the export of data is crucial to the utility of these systems. Further consideration and testing of CMS functionality would be proactive steps towards adoption.

City Fruit is a coalition of Seattle non-profits whose mission is to promote “the cultivation of fruit in urban landscapes in order to nourish people, build community and protect the climate.” The goal of this project is to build a tool that will aid City Fruit in documenting and mapping Seattle’s geographically dispersed urban orchards which are harvested and cared for by the coalition’s staff and volunteers.

This project focuses on the visual display of tree information to serve needs of various stakeholders: tree owners, harvest coordinators, pickers, scientists, policy makers and generally concerned constituents. The City Fruit Tree Mapping Tool will enable City Fruit to efficiently catalog the inventory of fruit trees in Seattle neighborhoods and improve donation, harvesting and delivery activities by utilizing location-based geospatial information. The tool provides the ability to map trees, either in the field via a mobile handset client, or on the coalition’s website.

Clinicians in Haiti need quick access to HIV patient drug adherence status to accurately assess the patient’s medication regime, which is critical for combating HIV and maintaining the patient’s health. In the clinic, clinicians access this information through the iSante electronic medical record system. Current drug adherence status is difficult and time consuming to access in this system, which is problematic as a clinician can see up to 75 HIV patients a day in the clinic. To address this issue, this capstone project designed and developed a data visualization of patient drug adherence queried from the iSante system, providing a dynamic, visual interface that displays patient drug adherence status. By presenting patient drug adherence status and other biometric values in a graphical format, clinicians can make quicker treatment decisions and provide better care for their patients.

The King County Road Services Division keeps people moving by improving traffic flow and safety on local roadways. The division designs, builds, and maintains roads, bridges, walkways, bicycle facilities, and traffic management systems in King County. It is responsible for nearly 2,000 miles of roadway and 185 bridges. Through five interviews which included managers and field supervisors, our Capstone project on wireless technology selection delivered concise data from People and Their Information Needs, ROI and vendor evaluation responses and recommendation of wireless technologies to be explored indicated by the QFD (Quality Function Deployment) tool. The end result is a document outlining a roadmap taking into consideration the current and 2 year vision, which can assist King County Department Managers when making a decision on which wireless technology and vendor can deliver the most cost effective wireless solution in order to increase productivity for the Road Services field workers.

Nearly four years after Hurricane Katrina the Gentilly neighborhood in New Orleans lacked a single resource where homeowners and businesspeople could access up-to-date information about rebuilding their homes and businesses. We teamed with the University of Washington's Jim Diers, Fritz Wagner and Robin Moeur, as well as community leaders from New Orleans' Gentilly neighborhood. The goals of this project were to aid the Gentilly neighborhood rebuilding effort, promote both the Gentilly neighborhood, and the New Orleans community at large, and build a community by providing a place where residents could exchange information. We prototyped a web-based resource center that would act as a proof-of-concept to aid our sponsors in securing funding for the next phase of the project which includes content gathering and development. The prototype was designed through user-centered methods including extensive user research. The testing of the prototype helped inform our recommendations for the project’s second phase.

Search Engines are one of the main resources of information in the current information-hungry world. This capstone project is intended to classify the health related queries out of the ~40 million AOL Search Engine queries. This classification was performed using pattern matching algorithms. A medical dictionary was also generated using data from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and was used to perform the pattern matching. This capstone poster explains the automated data gathering, extraction and pattern matching steps of the process. The results include a comparison of the manual and automated classification and the frequency of major medical terms matched.

Established in 2007 by the passage of State Senate Bill 5320, the Washington State Office of Public Guardianship (OPG) is charged with providing guardianship services to individuals most in need. Though it is an organization of last resort, for those without family or friends willing and able to serve as guardians, and who lack the funds to pay for professional guardians themselves, the care provided must be of the highest quality. (Guardians are responsible for ensuring personal and financial decisions are made for incapacitated persons, as determined by the court.) OPG requires a case management system to easily track guardians, the well-being of their charges, expenditures, and the program’s effectiveness. The systems currently in use lack major functionality and utilize disparate technologies. We conducted contextual inquiries and interviews and evaluated business processes to assist us with the creation of a requirements document, which outlines needed functionality for the proposed system.

For many years researchers have studied customer relationship in a physical environment that involves face-to-face interactions between front-end personnel and customers. Now, with e-channel service delivery, practitioners and scholars are interested in re-examining citizen/customer relationship in online settings. There have been few, if any, research studies comparing the challenges of Citizen/Customer Relationship in E-Commerce to E-Government.

This Capstone is part of a large E-Commerce to E-Government Comparative Analysis (E2ECA) project, a joint creation of Jochen Scholl and Karine Barzilai-Nahon, aimed at deepening the understanding of cross-sector similarities and differences. To that end the team completed the cluster analysis of focus group transcripts and developed theoretical propositions.

We identified the main challenges in the area of Citizen/Customer Relationship E-Commerce and E-Government are facing and insights into what these two sectors can learn from each other. Finally, we build an assessment instrument for testing hypotheses developed in the exploratory phase of E2ECA research.

This study set out to defend user experience improvements founded on usability testing, and therefore make a strong case for user involvement and usability testing within CONTENTdm’s development cycle.

CONTENTdm is digital content management software that allows organizations to make their collections of local history archives, newspapers, books, maps, and slide libraries available online. We observed users completing structured tasks and looked for patterns of issues in their usage. We then generated a set of recommendations centered on ease-of-use, learnability, and way-finding in the software. By working as a user advocate, we brought the needs and thoughts of the user directly into the software development process, which added value to the organization and created a more satisfying user experience.

As the University of Washington (UW) expands its efforts to track environmentally sustainable efforts across its campuses, it becomes more and more urgent for this data to be stored and managed centrally to ensure consistency and open access to the information. As part of an effort to make central management possible, this project creates a "first draft" effort at defining the structure of the data that the University has tracked and must continue tracking in order to ensure its sustainability. Incorporating reviews of documents available to various UW stakeholders, interviews, and various information management and user-centered design methodologies, this XML structure is being proposed for active use within the UW.

The Burke Museum, located on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, is a major national resource for information on the natural and cultural history of the Pacific Northwest and is the only major natural history museum in the Northwest. Our capstone focused on developing information architecture for a website that delineates the various expeditions undertaken by the Burke Museum’s researchers. The website will serve a public audience and educate interested users about Burke's dedication to preserving and caring for the Earth and the cultures living on it. We followed the user centered design methodology: User requirements assembling and analysis, Ideation, Rapid prototyping, Evaluation and Final Prototyping. The prototype includes a main site portraying the map of the world with links to various expeditions. These links lead to interior pages containing information about the researcher, his/her work and details about the expedition.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN control more than 90% of search market in the United States with the expectation that each of these companies serves relevant results. With this in mind, a study was designed to compare the user ratings of unbranded search results with the search rankings provided by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. First, an API search tool was implemented to gather user search queries during a set of information-seeking tasks. Next, users were presented with a list of the unbranded search results from all three search engines and asked to rate results as either “relevant,” “partially relevant,” or “not relevant.” Finally, data analysis was performed on all search results to compare user relevancy ratings against those provided by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The goal of this study is to give users insights about the relevancy of search engine results and the effects of branding.

Malicious web pages that launch drive-by-download attacks on web browsers have increased in recent years. High Interaction Client honeypots are security devices that can detect these malicious web pages on a network. These honeypots are resource-intensive and unable to handle the increasing array of vulnerable clients. This capstone tries to develop a hybrid model which would use a previously developed novel classification method and a malicious script identification method for detecting malicious web pages. Because of the unique structure of malicious front-end web pages and centralized exploit servers, merely counting the number of domain name extensions and Domain Name System (DNS) servers used to resolve the host names of all web servers involved in rendering a page is sufficient to determine whether a web page is malicious or benign, independent of the vulnerable web browser. Combining the high interaction client honeypots and this capstone leads to performance improvement.

Learning Gateway is an eLearning Program (an organization-wide initiative) developing training modules for physicians at UW Medicine. eLearning is offered on an enterprise Learning Management System platform.

Problem: Learning Gateway did not have a web presence and branding efforts were still underway within the larger organization. As a result, 1) stakeholders and users did not know what Learning Gateway is and what this program can do for them; 2) residents, fellows and attending physicians at UW Medicine had difficulties finding training requirements, solutions and contacts when they needed help.

Solution: I built a web presence for the Learning Gateway as a program, an eLearning portal, and a department within UW Medicine. The website will serve as a central place for showcasing eLearning demos for peer reviewers, hosting the UW Medicine eLearning blog, and offering eLearning resources and tips to the entire organization.

The UW Physics Graduate students lack an information center designed to provide the most updated computing resources and solutions for technical problems with their huge software and applications needs. Consequently, pressure on the help ticket system has been increased, and the Physics Astronomy Computing Service (PACS) team’s normal work load and schedule have been affected. However, the Astronomy department has similar user needs and expectations, but a different organizational culture, maintaining a computing wiki by using Media Wiki engine, which specifically targets graduate students’ computing needs and solutions.

This project improves the physics students’ self-service ability by redesigning and combining several separate Wikipedia sites, building a central physics wiki site with appropriate structure, layout and content. A usability survey was conducted to ensure the quality met user expectations. The wiki provided a space for graduate students to browse, edit and add technical documentation, and more importantly facilitated the knowledge collaboration.

Mike’s Hard Lemonade needs to improve its forecasting system which allows the organization to conduct production forecasting more accurately. Currently, the majority of the data are stored in digital format; however, the data need to be further organized and analyzed. In order to generate valuable information, this new forecasting system will provide the ability to answer the most important question: what is the quantity of products that should be produced for the next time period? This Capstone focuses efforts on the short-term goal—improving/rebuilding the forecasting system, which will help achieve the long-term goal—new product forecasting.

The ongoing threat posed by terrorist networks must be addressed. Due to the nature and complexity of such networks, detailed investigations of their weaknesses are impossible to conduct. Through understanding the elementary behavior of these groups and the individuals that comprise them, it is possible to represent these networks through a computer generated model.

The basis of this model is to evaluate the efficiency of different attempts to disrupt or destroy these networks. This provides a cheap but effective theoretical base for developing actionable strategies. This functional prototype can easily be translated to represent various other “dark networks”; human trafficking rings, bot-nets, illegal drug/weapon trade, etc.

TalentSpring, Inc., a leading provider of semantic search technology for talent sourcing, enables recruiters and hiring managers to quickly find résumés of top candidates for open job descriptions utilizing revolutionary resume-ranking algorithms. However, recruiters spend a fair amount of time and effort selecting qualified candidates and contacting them in the recruiting process. A new system needs to be designed to overcome the following challenges on TalentSpring’s website:

• Recruiters must repetitively compose E-mails to candidates for different positions
• Recruiters must recall details from many résumés
• Recruiters, especially from big companies, must organize a large number of résumés in a systematic way

Our design saves recruiters’ and hiring managers’ time and effort, enabling them to create E-mail templates and folders to manage tens of thousands of résumés found on social networking sites, job boards, and corporate applicant tracking systems (ATS). By using our system, recruiters and managers can reduce their overall time to-hire rates.

We were inspired to work with Africa as One (AAO), a nonprofit for impact organization that wishes to monitor and facilitate humanitarian efforts in Africa. AAO was in need of an information system infrastructure that encompasses evaluation tools, data exchange technology, and communication and collaboration software. Based on Information Management Principles, we provided Best Practices to help AAO achieve its business strategic goals. Having recognized AAO as a grass-roots organization, we developed a Technology Strategic Roadmap for the next two years. This roadmap is a conceptual framework that helps AAO access and develop software + services and tools by using emerging ‘cloud’ technology. Cloud technology will enable AAO to utilize storage and computing power that resides on the Internet, with little to no upfront cost. Our framework grants authority and security of an information infrastructure that can scale to the organization’s growth, as it formulates its business processes.

Visual search engines were developed as alternatives to traditional search engines that have text-based user interfaces. They present the results in a graphical form as images, charts, or website thumbnails. The purpose of this project is to investigate how users search for information using visual search engines and to evaluate how the visual features of these search engines help users with the search task. Forty-five searchers participated in the study. Data were collected using an eye-tracking device, participant observation, and online survey responses. The results, among other findings, report on the effect of training and search effectiveness, and on user satisfaction in using the visual search engines.

The Internal Medicine residents in the UWMC School of Medicine rotate through a series of local clinical locations. On each of the rotations residents must be oriented to new staff, workflows, and educational requirements. There is a need for:

• A central website with specific information for each of these rotations, so that residents can easily access answers to common questions that arise when they start a new rotation
• Residents to update such a website so that they can pass along updated and correct information about various aspects of the rotations

The purpose of my capstone project is to design and build a wiki website for the UW Internal Medicine residents to meet their information needs during the rotations.