iSchool Capstone

Award Winner

2015

TuneBI: Mobile Marketing Visualization

TuneBI: Mobile Marketing Visualization Fei Guo, Yanling Hu, Xiaojuan Wu, Jun Fan (Full-Time MSIM) Sophisticated marketers use TUNE BI (Business Intelligence) to extend their analytics capabilities without the traditional time, expenses, and risk of developing their own business intelligence platform. We worked with TUNE, one of the best mobile applications tracking company in the world, to develop and enhance the visualization experiences of the new TUNE BI services. The new TUNE BI dashboards consist of many Key Performance Indicators such as Return on Investment per Ad campaign and publisher, Average Revenue Per User and Cost of New User Acquisition, and many more. TUNE BI dashboards take out the hassle of understanding analytics, and help marketers and executives to focus on making quick and effective decisions.

Turnip

When friends and family go out to eat, they can have difficulties determining what restaurants that they should go to because everyone can have different tastes and values. Turnip allows you to find good restaurants that have meal choices that fit your diet, even if they don’t specifically cater to you. Without our service, an individual would have to go through every restaurant’s website, find their menu, and parse out the information. Turnip users can search for a food item and filter the results by our four main categories: vegan, vegetarian, dairy-free, and gluten-free. A grid of pictures of restaurants that have food that match their search will show up with their address, contact information, and operating hours. The user can then click on the photos to look at each dish that satisfy their diet.

Understanding Music Streaming Service Users Through Persona Identification

Commercial music streaming services represent the fastest growing sector of the music recording industry, accounting for 32% of all digital revenue in 2014. User studies emerging from the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research are currently being used to guide the strategic development of recommendation systems and new methodologies for the navigation of large music collections. This project serves to test the generalizability of seven user personas, constructed in prior research, and seeks to identify the significance of design implications for various user types. Approximately 1,000 users of music services were surveyed in order to determine behaviors and preferences when interacting with such services. Using a stratified sampling framework, key characteristics were extracted to classify users into specific persona subgroups. Such findings can inform designers of MIR systems and music streaming services in the development of targeted approaches, rather than a universal service model.

Universal Tagging as Folders in Personal Information Management

Personal information management (PIM) is a vital topic in information studies. Traditionally, PIM systems provided folders for information storage and retrieval. Nevertheless, in the era of Web 2.0, it is possible that tags can be widely used in the PIM systems. In recent years, much progress has been made in PIM, but many fail to achieve the goal of making tagging method widely used. Our project – designing and developing a web-based application overcomes the barrier between traditional hierarchical folders structure and tagging system offering a “Universal Tagging” model. This new application gives Internet users more freedom in choosing how to store and retrieve their own personal information items, particularly web references, through a simple, uncomplicated User Interface and efficient matching “Tagging” as folders mechanism. As always, people look forward to a better way to organize, re-find and share their personal information items. And we are innovating.

University of Washington Press Physical Archives

The University of Washington Press is a scholarly publishing house which prints approximately 50 new titles each year in a range of academic fields. About 1,400 of these titles are currently available in physical and e-book formats, but more than 3,000 titles of the backlist are yet to be digitized. The purpose of the Physical Archives project is to help make these print books available to individual readers and library collections through digitization. Using the Press’s physical space and database, I was able to gather, organize and document the books of the archives. I reviewed and organized the collection, recorded the bibliographic data in the database, and prepared physical books for scanning. As more readers move to electronic formats and devices, this project will allow these books to reach a larger audience than they might as purely print editions.

UW Libraries and the Greater Western Library Alliance: Student Learning Impact Study

How does the academic library contribute to the overall success of an institution, particularly with regard to the academic performance of its students? The Greater Western Library Alliance has formed a research body of 20 institutions to investigate the impact of library instruction on first-year student achievement and retention. Through its participation, the UW Libraries seek to measure the impact of their teaching and learning activities in the Expository Writing Program and First Year Interest Group courses. As part of the pilot phase, we conducted an analysis of library instruction data for the academic year 2014-2015 and de-identified student data, including GPA and retention, while also exploring the impact of specific types of library instruction on student achievement. Our findings will be used to create a set of best practices in library instruction and to inform recommendations for improving the UW Libraries Teaching and Learning Program.

UW Parking Hero

At UW, commuters have a tough time trying to find parking at campus parking lots & garages and pay for higher parking rates. Drivers get stuck in redirect loops and often have difficulty coordinating carpools. Our solution to this issue is a mobile application called “Parking Hero”. Our application provides commuters with information about which parking lots are full and which aren’t ahead of time so they can head straight to an open lot from the start, saving time and stress. It also allows them to connect with other commuters to coordinate carpooling to get the cheaper carpooling rate. This application will help decrease the congestion of UW parking lots and garages and improve the amount of carpoolers to UW campus.

UW Splaces: Companion App for UW Campus Tours

Splaces is the first, tour-centric UW Android app that allows users to explore 154 years of the university’s rich and gritty history. This project revamps the existing three-part Spaces and Places campus tour, originally created by the UW Office of the University Architect (OUA). Historically, Spaces and Places was limited to being available as an online PDF, phone tree, and placard. Now, with Splaces, all of those are accessible in the palm of your hand. Maps, routes, and points of interest are hosted by the UW Capital Projects Office (CPO). By using their geographic information systems (GIS) we hope to show the potential of having a centralized, sustainable infrastructure for location-based data, and set a precedent for other groups and departments to follow. We would like to give special thanks to our partners at the CPO and OUA for helping make this project possible.

VROOM

VROOM is a Head-Up Display (HUD) that enables a safer driving experience. HUD systems utilize projection hardware and reflective displays to put data on car windshields. Their position on the windshield enables quick information recognition so drivers can keep more focus on the road during travel. VROOM is a HUD controlled with voice commands, which seamlessly integrates into a user's natural driving habits. Our application also prompts drivers to stop for gas sooner than their tank will hit empty based on environmental factors and driving habits. Our technology increases the visibility of energy consumption and car diagnostics to drivers while enabling informed drivers to create safer driving habits. UW EcoCar will be adapting our custom hardware and software for use in their next competition car.

Wikitree

Wikitree is a web application built to help undergraduates with their research. Wikitree tracks and organizes the user’s browsing history through Wikipedia articles. Wikitree is unique because it emphasizes mental connections the user makes on their journey. Wikitree aims to stay adaptable for each individual’s research goals. Our research and user testing revealed many struggles. Undergraduates struggle to dive deep into one topic while staying aware of the big picture. They struggle to mentally categorize connections between different topics during early stages of research. They struggle with feeling overwhelmed by the amount of material encountered, and finding a clear vision within. Wikitree acts as an aid for the user in tracking their explorations. The visualization helps users maintain a high level overview, preventing them from feeling overwhelmed, getting sidetracked, or losing sight of their goals. Special thanks: Mike Freeman, Jeffrey Heer, Jessica Hullman, David McDonald, David Stearns, and Jevin West.