Our project consists of the development of a system that aims at helping the non-profit organization Seattle Tilth to keep in touch with students that have graduated from one of their programs. Until today, our sponsor did not have any formal way of contacting their alumni, and any communication that happened was merely informal. Our research with current and former students showed that the best mix of media was e-mail, SMS and Facebook. We then built a communication system managed via Salesforce. Our sponsor will provide useful information through these channels on a regular basis for engaging alumni; structured surveys to gather information about the current status of the alumni will also be sent.

ASAP International LLC is a small logistics firm based in Texas and Mexico. It specializes in high-importance deliveries made by hand. Its website and branding had not been updated in more than five years. During that time span, the web underwent a slew of changes during which users began to eschew desktop devices for mobile ones. ASAP International’s old site didn’t reflect the firm’s credibility in handling essential transactions or the quick, lean image it sought to project. We assisted ASAP International in revamping its image to customers through branding and a website redesign which, for the first time, includes optimization for mobile devices. Through this rebranding and redesign, we crafted a more representative image and focused website that will drive future customers to contact and work with ASAP.

“Fuzzy search publications” are academic works that hide behind a wall of vagueness, and researchers and students often find it difficult to search for them or evaluate the credibility of the content they found using search tools. This poster presents the Heuristic (Expert) Evaluation for a Microsoft Academic Search web tool that aims to help people find “Fuzzy search publications” through an integration of browse and search. In collaboration with my sponsor, I designed the evaluation process, organized a panel of student experts specialized in User Experience Research and Design, Information Architecture or HCI, and conducted evaluation to get the experts’ feedback on the prototype. My contribution will validate and inform the design decisions of Microsoft Research’s design process to provide better user experience for the customers and users.

Inexperienced chess players fixate on small sectors of the board and individual pieces. Visualization is one key to better perception and understanding of a chess game. We present Chess Scouter, a digital chess application that dynamically overlays visualizations onto the board that emphasize and clarify the overall state of the board, pieces, and the relationships between them. We speculate that by visually emphasizing these details, novice chess players will be able to more quickly and meaningfully interpret important threats, patterns, and opportunities, and make better moves. Initial response to Chess Scouter indicates that users enjoy playing with the visualizations and are encouraged to examine the board as a result of them. We will conduct further investigation with a qualitative study on novice chess players to determine the clarity and utility of the visualizations in Chess Scouter.

ChronoZoom is an interactive online time visualization tool dedicated to help envision the temporal relationships between events throughout history and across disciplines. The ChronoZoom team believes this visualization would be very useful for education, and so wants for the tool to be used in schools. However, there have been no prior test cases into how ChronoZoom actually performs in a classroom. Our project addresses this problem by helping two courses at the UW to integrate ChronoZoom into their curriculum. We then analyzed its impact through surveys, interviews, focus groups and class observations. Through our research, we provide recommendations on how the tool needs to be improved to accommodate the environment of a college classroom, and whether or not it is worthwhile for a university to adopt the technology based on student and instructor experiences.

Costco’s Information Systems (IS) department is a vital part of their ongoing success.  To support the company’s stellar growth, the IS department is embarking on major system enhancement projects and taking a closer look at how they manage technology projects. The team needs specific project management metrics that will help them to examine and fine-tune their project management processes over time. Our Capstone project provides Costco a framework of project management best practices, tools and metrics. This toolkit will empower Costco’s IS team to continue their strong tradition of effectively and efficiently supporting core business goals.

While people familiar with the field of Information Technology (IT) are able to understand new terms by associating them with previous knowledge or current context, those outside the industry struggle with new words and acronyms as they read dense technical documents. In these circumstances, people often rely on free resources like Wikipedia, but results often require disambiguation or a deeper search in order to find the appropriate definition for a term. Additionally, switching attention between reading and searching has been shown to increase cognitive load and perceived stress level, while reducing the effectiveness of both tasks. To address this problem, we created D//Jargonizer: an extension for the Google Chrome web browser that allows users to define technical terms in context with minimal distraction. When users right click a word on a web page, a brief version of the term’s Wikipedia entry is displayed in context. After testing our prototype with several individuals, we refined our initial design to deliver a seamless user experience. By limiting the need for rapid attention switching between windows or tabs, our solution reduces cognitive load and improves the overall user experience as people read jargon-heavy documents.

As the “big data” era’s arriving, generating accurate and timely information from data has become the key to the success of any organizations. It is crucial to deliver high quality data efficiently. However, traditional methods (e.g. ETL) could be slow and costly. Data virtualization is a technology that can solve these problems. It is an important part for an agile, cost-effective data management infrastructure. By using data virtualization tools, the delivery of data will become fast, flexible, and efficient. Data virtualization is a technology that has great impacts on business. By understanding Russell Investments’ data management infrastructure, we researched on different data virtualization tools, and recommended software based on the company’s environment.  Our project helps Russell Investments with their decision-making regarding the acquisition of the technology. It will certainly help them to achieve better business performance.