Approximately half of the US immigrant population is limited English proficient (LEP). The language barrier leads to stress and health issues and hinders immigrants’ employment opportunities, social environment, and more. Existing online translation services don’t offer further explanation and are often unusable for immigrants with limited education, including low reading and writing comprehension in their home language. Our app bridges this gap and provides real-time, interactive translation help from bilingual and multilingual volunteers who can further explain translations and the context surrounding them, whether cultural or technological. Wave helps LEP users navigate daily life with independence and peace of mind.

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.

Otherworld Media is a nonprofit media production organization that creates educational programs for children. It produced a radio show “A is for Adventure” with various literary themes and genres. Otherworld wanted library scavenger hunts to tie into the radio show to encourage children to use library resources. As the needs of today’s children changed due to the pandemic, the initial designs for scavenger hunts were adapted into an outline for an online game. A programmer is using the framework of games and resources we created to complete development of the game.

When responding to emergencies, police and firefighting organizations often miss critical pieces of information which adversely affects their response. As part of a pilot program for entrepreneurial capstone projects, Adaptive Resilience, LLC involves equal parts business and product development in an attempt to create a product that meets information needs of emergency responders and a business model to support the product. Through user-centered design practices and rapid generation and iteration of business models, we have come up with a novel solution oriented around a data-aggregation pipeline and UI that could be rapidly realized and scaled beyond a single industry application.

Oftentimes, most information about an art display in a museum is contained on a small plaque next to the piece. Museum-goers usually do not have access to any further information about the art they are looking at. This Henry Art Gallery Guide App aims to supplement the modern museum experience and increase art awareness. Our platform directly addresses this issue by giving users an interactive guide to their museum of choice with detailed information about individual art pieces. We allow museum-goers to easily and immediately learn more about pieces that pique their interest during their visit.

Our capstone is for UW's Sephardic Studies Digital Library. It focuses on the research needed for launching a crowdsourced transcription site for the 400+ digitized materials in Ladino, Sephardic Jews' endangered language, housed in their Digital Library. Our goal is to offer a place for the global Sephardic community and researchers to have access to Sephardic cultural heritage. We explored various transcription platforms to write a paper for best practices and created assessment and rubric sheets to better inform our sponsor. This results in the Sephardic Studies Program having the research complete before making design decisions for their transcription platform.

Despite 'Open-Plan' workspace having its stimulating collaboration and teamwork, it has many issues that trouble employees daily. Through the team’s research and analysis, we found out that noisy environments, lack of privacy, personalization, and health concerns are some of the major issues in an 'Open-Plan' workspace, and that workers of different job functions have different levels of dissatisfaction for 'Open-Plan' workspaces. Our design idea is a private/quiet space lookup system with real-time updates on the office spaces’ condition so that the workers can navigate within the office accurately based on their needs for privacy or quietness.

Math. It’s tough. Especially for first-graders who struggle with staying motivated to learn in their own little world. HabiHero is a conservation-themed, math-based learning game with the goal of making math fun, customizable, and socially impactful. HabiHero uses gamification with a focus on saving endangered animals and their habitats. Each animal represents a topic in the math curricula that is based on the Common Core Standard. As users solve problems, they earn habi-badges and habi-coins that can be redeemed to customize your hero. Parents and teachers can also track progress and create lessons to have their little heroes solve.

The new European Studies Section (ESS) is an integration of the Slavic & Eastern European Section (SEES) and the Western European Section (WESS) of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL - a division of the American Library Association). ESS will be hosted on a new Wordpress site giving a chance for an intentional design based on user research and content analysis. This site is serving academics and professionals in European affairs and history, while also supporting study and research. This project serves to meet this purpose by creating a website that is inclusive of the WESS and SEES.

Every non-profit organization deserves to have an accurate, efficient, eco-friendly and user-friendly donation process. Through a seamless integration of donation data, Mary’s Place employees are able to focus their efforts on maintaining shelters and increasing donations. Our digital in-kind donation form reduces human errors made in the current laborious donation input process. Additionally, our solution eliminates the need for paper forms and is a personalized interface for Mary’s Place. With our solution, an 8 hour data entry process becomes a 3 minute task.