iSchool Capstone

Award Winner

2013

Unconventional Materials: Rescuing Air and Space History

The Museum of Flight Library’s technical files cover everything from aviation history to aircraft technical specifications. The collection’s depth and breadth makes it a potential source of tremendous value. Even noted historians have found materials within their areas of expertise that they did not know existed. However, neglect and disorganization have resulted in underuse. Finding things can be so difficult that researchers tend to avoid using the technical file collection. We analyzed the state of the collection and interviewed its primary users to determine their needs. We made recommendations for reorganizing and maintaining the files, and began implementing the changes. Most importantly, we left the library a procedures manual and other documentation to complete the project and keep the collection usable in the future.

University Advancement Donor Portal: Content Strategy and Tagging

University Advancement drives private support for the UW by fostering strong relationships with donors, and this means keeping donors informed on matters of interest and importance to them. To better provide such information – and improve stewardship of benefactors at all levels – Advancement is developing an online donor portal. We have researched and recommended a plan for pulling news content from multiple sources throughout the university and delivering personalized news to donors in this portal. We identified different news sources, determined the technical capability of each to feed its content to the portal, and performed content audits and analyses. We also assembled a set of tags for indexing this content which facilitates the dynamic selection of items for donors based on their interests and affiliations.

UW Libraries Website Redesign

The UW Libraries initiated a project to create a device-agnostic responsive website in order to integrate a new catalog search system that allows the library website and services can be accessed at any time, any place and by any user. With the purpose of creating a better user experience for the great variety of patrons that include undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty and staff, and the public, we focused heavily on user experience research and design. We updated libraries’ patron personas that include new technology use and library services. To iterate the design quickly and to ensure that the project receives constant user feedback, the Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation method was utilized throughout the project. As a result, new portal and services pages are created, and the information architecture was redefined to better meet the needs of the diverse group of patrons that the library serves.

UW Medicine Locator

Current ways of finding UW Medicine clinic information can be challenging. Search engines yield mixed results depending prior knowledge, and the lack of a mobile version of the current UW Medicine website diminishes the user experience on mobile devices. To address these problems and more, I designed a high-fidelity prototype of the UW Medicine Locator - a native mobile android application for finding and navigating to clinics. The application streamlines the process of finding and navigating to over 100 UW Medicine clinics by providing a simple interface, enhanced clinic information organization and retrieval methods, ability to save clinics, view previous findings, and access to onsite navigation using Google Maps Floor Plan.

UWPD Mobile App Prototype

The UW Police mobile application prototype attempts to address missed opportunities for information sharing by creating an information portal, utilizing established lines of communication, to increase the accessibility of its resources. The app leverages the mobile platform, with software developed using open source tools, to provide public safety resources in a more user-friendly interface in an effort to develop a safer and more informed UW community. The objective is to enhance the efficiency with which the community engages with its Police and in that same token, increasing the UWPD's effectiveness in exchanging information with its community.

Vyrtical

The community for Blender, a 3D graphics application, has become a stagnant cesspool of websites targeting novice 3D artists. In response, we have created Vyrtical, a web space where advanced Blender artists can foster improvement by competing, inspiring, and contributing to the community while showcasing the best works created in Blender. Using prior surveys and by analyzing related websites, we determined that the Blender user base is dispersed, immature, and lacks professional engagement in the community. Vyrtical is now open for the benefit of the community and has begun allowing Blender artists to share their high quality works and will continue to inspire and motivate Blender artists far into the future.

Washington Talking Book and Braille Library: Virtual Youth Programming

Although the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library has long served the needs of the visually impaired community in Washington state, they find themselves limited with their connections to remotely located patrons. I have proposed a solution in which remotely-located youth patrons can connect with local youth patrons and WTBBL staff by using web-conferencing tools. Web-conferencing tools generally include features such as audible notifications and screen reader support, allowing WTBBL patrons to connect with each other and with WTBBL staff. By connecting with their peers, WTBBL youth patrons build an even stronger network of peers. This network encourages literacy advancement, involvement in library programs and will likely develop important friendships, too.

What’s The Value of Our Content? A Content Strategy Audit for REI

REI’s Outdoor Programs division has a mission is to inspire and educate people about the outdoors through a series of classes, events, and worldwide travel programs. Unfortunately, they often lack the investment from the organization to improve their content’s effectiveness for customers. A multi-dimensional approach was taken to consider over 60 on-site, off-site, and social engagement standards and best practices for all 2,100+ pages of REI’s content. This quantitative and qualitative audit resulted in an estimated $1,000,000 of immediate organic search (SEO) benefits along with a prioritized list of high-ROI recommendations for future investment. These outcomes will help grow REI Outdoor Programs to educate and inspire more people to become active outdoors for a lifetime of adventure and stewardship.

Where To Turn For Teens: Digitizing Resources

As a teenager, finding community support services while in crisis or under emotional distress is incredibly hard; the health and human services system is complex, and services are rarely marketed to adolescents. Teen Link is a service of King County’s Crisis Clinic that recognizes problem. For the past decade they have produced a booklet titled “Where to Turn for Teens,” which lists mental health and human services targeted at youth in King County. Since the Crisis Clinic is a non-profit, production and distribution of this guide is constrained by material resources: content is updated annually, budget restricts quantity, and distribution is limited to physical handouts. This results in a high-demand publication that is potentially outdated and limited in both scope and reach. We created a mobile application based on this guide which provides youth with offline access to the same information. The application is designed to lower distribution costs, allow more frequent updates, expand the details of each service listing, and bolster the larger mission of Teen Link: to empower youth with access to information and support when they need it most."

Why Search Twice

Web history supposedly shows users where they have been and finds websites they previously visited. Currently, browsers display web history as a dense, hard-to-read list. This list does not reflect how users use web browsers and does not match the relational way that humans remember. Our research shows that these basic history pages provide little value to users, who are forced to make up for inadequate functionality with bookmarks or memory. Our service takes this underutilized but highly potent data and visualizes it so users can better understand how they use the web. We compile meaningful graphs, trends, and relationships to give users insights into their browsing behavior. While we are beginning with this foundational tool to collect and display data, we plan to expand this service to be able to help users discover websites based on their previous browsing and be able to easily locate past websites they’ve visited via natural language graph search.