The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But when it comes to moving freight, that line becomes complex. In these uncertain times of political upheaval, natural disasters and huge amount of freight theft, Route Assessor aims to empower Expeditors in choosing better delivery routes based on various risk parameters. This robust web based solution helps Expeditors in recommending the best route to the customer, so that risk can be intelligently and appropriately managed. A real time risk score is calculated for a given source and destination, based on FBI crime data, Freightwatch data, weather and commodity type. With Route Assessor, Expeditors can provide a holistic risk assessment of customer’s shipment by helping them to choose better risk mitigation products and provide a superior quality of service compared to its competitors. Route Assessor reduces the probability of an “unwanted surprise” within the supply chain logistic.

The Wilhelm Hester Photography Collection is a vital resource for both maritime and local historians, as well as a valuable asset to UW Special Collections. Unfortunately, as is frequently the case in large academic institutions, time constraints and financial pressures mean that the initial processing was basic, resulting in a poor-quality finding aid and inadequate document housing. Improper housing placed the photographs at risk from acidification and mechanical damage, whilst the inadequate finding aid dramatically reduced their accessibility. Our sponsor decided to completely restructure the collection and asked our team for help. We laid the foundation for this project by rehousing over 300 photographs and revamping the online description with enhanced metadata for a more intuitive user experience. Our work will transform the user’s first point of contact f into a gateway for collection discovery, enhancing its usability and maximizing our university’s contribution to research.

Trek.fm is an expansive podcast network of over 20 different podcasts that cover every corner of the Star Trek universe and beyond. Since 2010 the network has been consistently growing as thousands of listeners download Trek.fm podcasts each month to engage in fun, engaging, and thought-provoking discussions with other listeners. My project is focused on increasing the accessibility of the Trek.fm website. I cultivated data on the core series-focused podcasts on the network and developed a tagging system to better serve the users needs. This tagging system will make it easier for hosts to understand how to tag their own content in the future to keep the website cohesive as it grows. There are also new dedicated lists and guides for each show to act as a reference for listeners browsing for content as well. With this project Trek.fm is more accessible to both search queries and browsing.

User onboarding is critical in helping new customers successfully adapt to a product. Currently, TUNE’s innovative but extremely complex mobile marketing products provide minimal onboarding assistance for new users. This results in high drop off rates and new customers choosing competitor products. Our team set out to tackle this onboarding problem using the design process. We performed extensive research and competitive analysis to test a combination of new and existing onboarding patterns. Informed by this research and testing, we created a new set of patterns that would solve our sponsor’s specific onboarding issues. When implemented, these new patterns will not only help new users find the product’s core value faster but also lower the number of rudimentary questions that support team and sales engineers need to answer. Overall, this will help acquire new customers, retain existing customers and increased revenue.

eSports is a rapidly growing industry where competitive online video gaming has reached a whopping 71 million followers. Gaming professionals compete and specialize in certain game genres such as real-time strategy, fighting, first-person shooter, or multiplayer online battle arenas. Gaming professionals have massive followings of fans who idolize their lives. Teaming up with Unikrn, an eSports betting startup in Seattle, we have been working hard at creating a mobile game to target eSports fans to hone their own gaming skills. Unikrn Assist will take hard-tom-aster aspects of competitive games and help fans to improve them anywhere using our mobile app. This app will help fans master their gaming skills in hopes that one day they will be able to become professional gamers.

The aim of our capstone was to create a sustainable backlist digitization solution, with supporting procedural documentation, for the University of Washington Press. Our work initiates a process that will give new life to thousands of out of print books and enhance the Press’s long-term product pipeline. Founded in 1915, the University of Washington Press has accumulated a backlist of books, spanning decades of important scholarly and cultural conversations. Our work extends the reach of Press, by renewing access to currently out of print titles, increasing opportunities for tie-in promotions, and generally allowing UWP to leverage their entire collection in new and exciting ways. In addition to providing benefit for the Press and their authors and publishing partners, increasing global access to UWP’s unique collection through libraries, retailers, academic institutions, and community partners will be a value add for scholarly and cultural conversation around the globe.

UW GAMER (GAME Research) Group has developed the UW/SIMM Video Game Metadata Schema. This Video Game Discovery Engine is constructed in order to implement the schema to catalog video games, and also to share this achievement to support the use of games in entertainment, education and science. The website enables users to find video games by searching or browsing through approaches that are more in quantity and better in quality when comparing to traditional websites. For example, users can browse by progression and visual style to discover video games on this engine. At this stage, our team has developed the website beta version and conducted user testing on visual design and functional design.

With the current number of political news sources and media outlets available, trying to stay up to date with politics can be quite overwhelming. Whether it be contradictory views or media bias, the political news landscape is becoming more complex and oversaturated. Many of these news sources can be dense and hard to navigate, making finding the content you actually want a daunting task. Vantage is a political news aggregation engine that simplifies the process of discovering, reading, and internalizing the latest news from the most popular political news sources. Our solution combines multiple news sources into a single consolidated news feed, making it quick and easy for users to navigate the potential bias of any one news source. Vantage makes consuming political news quick and effortless so that readers spend more time learning and less time searching.

The Vermont Queer Archives contains the records and materials of the queer community in Vermont. Historically, the queer community is underrepresented in institutional archiving, and the preservation of its culture falls on the community itself. Providing access to the archives is important so that community members and researchers are able to appreciate queer history in Vermont. The archives is a large 30 box collection consisting of organizational records, event posters and handouts, and over 50 queer-related newspapers and magazines. Access to the archives was limited because of a lack of organization or a catalog and a lack of awareness. Additionally, boxes were dispersed throughout the building because there was not enough room to store them together. To solve this problem, I arranged and organized the collection of 30 boxes, initiated a blog, and created new procedures related to collection to help maintain the archives for the future.