Health care costs are high for both consumers and the organizations that provide health care plans to their employees. Washington Health Alliance (WHA) works with organizations throughout the state of Washington, both private and public, to help reduce the overall cost of health care. Their goals include reducing price, overuse of services, and reducing underuse of effective care. HR representatives from WHA member organizations were surveyed to understand how they create a health care benefit strategy for their organization and how they communicate the strategy and plan with their employees. Among approximately 130 recipients there was a 12% response rate. The survey responses were used to create a sample health care plan purchaser persona, which can be used by WHA to prompt discussions with HR representatives about creating health care strategies and communicating their strategy and plan with their employees.

While cooking we spend a majority of time looking for recipes online and then matching it with our available kitchen inventory. This effort takes significant time and essentially results in cooking the same meals or spending money and eating out at a restaurant. It has become a reoccurring problem and one of the major motivations for our project. InstaCook, suggests recipes to the users based on the items they already have in the kitchen. Novice cooks will be able to use the application while cooking and operate it through voice commands and avoid the hassle of using a smart device with their messy hands. It empowers our users to experiment with new and variety of easy to cook recipes. Not only will this lead to a nutritious diet but will also minimize food wastage, as it effectively maintains a kitchen inventory leading to a decrease in expenditure.

A typical grocery store in your neighborhood grapples with the challenges of high operating costs, narrow margins and losses in expired inventory. Achieving incremental gains in optimizing inventory stocking, efficient consumption of utilities and avoiding wastages will result in huge impact on the bottom line of locally operated grocery stores. Our project ventures in this space to provide a facility management platform for store managers to centrally monitor performance of various devices in the store and collect insights for operational intelligence. We have designed a centralized dashboard for store managers to connect, configure and monitor performance of typical devices that you find in a grocery store. The dashboard can be used for fault and configuration management to minimize MTTR (mean time to response). Data is collected by a polling mechanism which queries devices about their statuses. The data collected can be used for rendering trending graphs and generate reports for forecasting and proactively detect issues before they arise.

For every book it’s reader, for every online dater their perfect match? More and more people are turning to dating sites and apps to find true love, but finding that match can be incredibly difficult. In 1931, Ranganathan, devised the Five Laws of Library Science, which connect books and readers. Using Ranganathan’s Laws as the theoretical framework, the team tackled these questions: How do people use online dating profiles? What attracts people to certain profiles? How can Ranganathan’s Laws of Library Science be adapted to online dating profiles to help users find each other? By conducting a literature review and interviews, the team delivers the “Five Laws of Online Dating Profiles” and recommendations on getting a profile noticed. This information can help researchers who are interested in studying online dating, developers of online dating apps and websites, and online daters looking to improve their profiles.

For-profit institutions have long tailored their space to best grab and retain people's attention. To address this need, some libraries hire firms to help them optimize their space based on unobtrusive observation. Our objective was to develop guidelines and protocols for libraries to conduct their own unobtrusive observational research in order to better understand patron behavior, and ultimately, to better serve their patrons. From these guidelines and protocols, we created a toolkit for community libraries. As an extension of a previous directed fieldwork at Sno-Isle Libraries, and in conjunction with Spokane County Library District, this toolkit includes video tutorials, observation instruments, and analysis tools. By putting these tools in the hands of librarians, any library will have the ability to collect and analyze more data at a lower cost, gaining valuable insight and feedback to help improve the patron experience.

Communication is an essential tool to express our needs. Unfortunately, not everyone has the skills or foundations necessary to communicate. Children who fit this description require additional support to build their verbal skills and may need training to interpret what others are trying to say. Point is a free tablet application aimed at giving children who have yet to build the foundations of communication an alternative voice. It does this by providing prepackaged line drawn icons that cover words commonly used among young communicators, but also gives you the ability to create your own words. Point focuses on the first words of communication rather than complex sentences like other applications do. Whether your child is at school, the park, or at the dinner table, Point provides your child with a large vocabulary in a quick and easy to access format.

Students nowadays are facing tremendous competition and pressure while applying for higher education. One of the most difficult parts is preparing for the tests. Test Innovators focus on promising the students with a brighter future by providing preparation online tests for different exams. Although the company has thrived in the business, it could maximize the profit by executing different pricing strategies. Combining lore in machine learning and business, our team conducts several experiments on the websites to observe the behavior of users, including free trial demo, subscription pricing and website A-B testing. We collect both user behavior and transaction data to perform analysis helping the business to grow its customer base and maximize revenue per capita simultaneously. Our work not only benefits the business, but also helps the students to have a prosperous future by increasing their chance to be admitted to an ivy-league college.

The Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery has an archive room where they store a collection of historical photographs, brand material, maps, and anything that relates to the history of the winery or property. One of the pain points for this archive is the usability of the room; people do not know what is available in the room. To assist in this problem I centered my project on creating catalog and index records for the archive. The company will be able to access these records through a SharePoint Team site that lists the contents of the archive in smaller collections, sorted by relevant categories. I also used Value Sensitive Design to figure out stakeholder needs, specifically how they could be integrated into making the archive room an asset for the winery. Marketing and Guest Services will now be able to find answers to historical and brand questions about the winery.

Have you ever been in a school project where you felt that you were doing most of the work and a few of your teammates were not contributing much? Imagine your frustration if those teammates also happened to be your friends! We bring in “Teamify”, a mobile application that will help teams keep track of each team member’s tasks using a point based system and provide visibility in their performance. It will reduce the pain points of team work by increasing the sense of accountability among the team members and make communication easier. Students can leverage this app to improve the team work experience and productivity of the team. As a proof of concept, we have designed a high-fidelity working mobile prototype and focused on the user experience of the app to help make team work hassle free and enjoyable!