Since launching in Fall 2015 as the University of Washington Libraries’ main discovery system, Ex Libris Primo has not been subjected to formal usability testing. Additionally, the UW Triennial Survey showed high dissatisfaction and negative feedback from students, faculty, and staff regarding the current library search experience. To improve their experience using the UW Libraries Search, we conducted user testing, analyzed the data, and provided design recommendations for implementation before the release of the newest iteration of Primo (Fall 2017). Our hope is for these recommendations to make a more user-friendly search system for UW library users.

In large cities like Seattle, there are many situations where people feel unsafe when travelling on foot, particularly at night. While it’s difficult to provide assistance in time to someone who has the misfortune of falling victim to crime, Safely aims to preemptively inform users of dangerous situations before they enter physical proximity of the danger. In a mobile app using map-based visualizations of Seattle Police Department crime logs, we show where crime has recently occurred and where “trouble areas” are. Through this and user-submitted incidents, Safely keeps users vigilant of threats instead of becoming victims to crime. Justine Edrozo (INFO), Kevin Ke (INFO), Brooks Lobe (INFO), Adrian Pacheco (INFO)

PitchBook Data is an online data platform that provides research, financial information, and resources to analyze private companies, investments and funds, private equity and venture capital. PitchBook wants to explore new ways to surface insightful information to their users by allowing them to discover more information beyond what they were searching for, making it a one stop shop for all of their VC research needs.

We are Símera. This team, made up of Sean Ker (Designer), Alexander Bell-Towne (Developer), Tyler Bauer (Developer), and Christopher Maglio (Project Manager), aims to revolutionize daily planning. Current planners require users to input a multitude of information, and also make the user decide the best way to go about completing these tasks. Our research found that many users are deterred by this painstakingly long process, and consequently developed a solution. Símera uses machine learning along with Artificial Intelligence to become the personal assistant for the everyday person. Simply tell us “I need to get milk” or “I need to go to the gym today” and Símera knows the who, what, when, and where in your schedule this event would be the most convenient.

Public libraries exist to provide equitable access to information, which requires continuously working with communities to understand their needs. My Capstone is part of SPL’s efforts to involve community members in their website redesign process. This project asks, “Who, taking into account language and digital access barriers, does not use spl.org, and why?”. To answer this question I analyzed data from SPL surveys and worked with branch libraries and community centers to design and run qualitative research sessions. My deliverables include data towards my research question and recommendations for conducting future SPL design research projects.

TellToo focuses on the journey we take as individuals to find meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in life. For many of us, technology has changed the way we socialize. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have pushed social interactions to shorter, less personal, and more trivial exchanges. This has left certain core elements of socialization in the dust. Our project focuses on modernizing those elements and building a platform that delivers a more human centric method of sharing and connecting. Our mobile application allows users to tell stories through audio recording and visually navigate chains of naturally related stories.

In online news, as in many forms of media, the appearance of content influences the reader, possibly even more than the content itself. Our experiment investigates this possibility further by researching how certain content-supporting attributes, such as links and pictures, affect how judgments are made about unfamiliar news sources, independent of any informative content. Studying how people evaluate the credibility of news sources is important because our society is increasingly turning to online news sources, while simultaneously becoming more adept at creating them. We hope our research will provide new insights into what factors influence what consumers of news believe.

The Total Resource Observation Utility Team (TROUT), created a data visualization using Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife’s (WDFW) high-resolution land change data. The interactive visualization makes this important data understandable to the public, policymakers, and environmental scientists. TROUT has unlocked this public data and improved access by disseminating in a clear, concise, user-centered dashboard presenting actionable information. This visualization allows the user to see actual changes in the Puget Sound over time with data-rich GIS information describing the changes. TROUT’s use of open-source technologies and code documentation mean the dashboard can be replicated for displaying future public spatial datasets.

A new addition to AWS, not much user research has been conducted on Kinesis, the company’s data streaming service, to understand its users’ needs and challenges. Presently, one major design question that exists is how can Kinesis’ entry points and onboarding experience be redesigned to help drive more engagements across different user personas who may interact with Kinesis. Through this project, in which our team has taken this design question through a user-centered and lean design process, we strive to help make Kinesis a better product for its users, thereby increasing its impact and prominence within the AWS family.