Boeing is continuously looking for ways to enhance the customer journey at its Customer Experience Center (“CEC”), where aircraft priced at hundreds of millions of dollars are marketed to airline executives worldwide. At the CEC, customers are given a tour of airliner mockups, which relies heavily on verbal descriptions, limiting the amount of information that can be communicated. For our project, we conceptualized and prototyped a location-aware application for client use throughout the tour. This app will provide customers detailed descriptions of Boeing aircraft by seamlessly transmitting information tailored for specific airlines relative to the user’s location within the tour. Utilizing a combination of Wi-Fi triangulation, Geofencing, and NFC technologies, the intuitive user interface displays images of alternate interiors layouts, configurations for lighting, colors and setups, as well as data such as fuel prices and measurements automatically relevant to the user’s location. Creating a seamless way to share information.

Approximately 17 percent of American adults report some degree of hearing loss. Such hearing problems can lead to frustrations and inconveniences in everyday life while listening to or communicating with others. Our team has created a free mobile application, Hear Rite, which diagnoses hearing impairments and provides an economical alternative to costly hearing aids. The first segment of our application takes the user through a hearing assessment, analyzes the user’s hearing capacity and provides feedback on their results. The second part of our application functions as a hearing aid, filtering out undesired pitches and tones while adjusting sound output using a built-in equalizer. The hearing aid utilizes the hearing test results to provide a custom tailored hearing aid to the user along with presets that cater to general sound environments, such as a private conversation or a large lecture hall. Through a series of user studies, we have shown that Hear Rite could be a cost-free alternative hearing aid for people with simple hearing impairment.

Most healthcare institutes have complicated step-by-step operation procedures to ensure safety and privacy protections. Reporting used in routine tasks for healthcare institutes must be customized to meet urgent needs within these organizations. To meet these needs, our project presented a solution using a high-scalability reporting tool: SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), connecting directly to the UW medical database. With SSRS, complicated data extractions can be handled without end users’ involvement; hundreds of reports can be customized and delivered within few seconds.

Websites that provide volunteering and donating opportunities often lack a centralized hub for communicating, displaying, and tracking the progress of service projects.  Most organizations have a way of keeping track of projects internally; however, with underserved communities, there may be a lack of resources to enable the efficient monitoring of project development and to obtain expertise on a project topic.  Imara is a web platform that promotes a social and collaborative atmosphere allowing volunteers, community members, donors and subject matter experts to exchange knowledge and contribute up-to-date information on the progress of projects.  This information allows project members to identify areas that need more resources, funding, expertise, or volunteer effort.  Users who evaluated Imara stated that it delivers a simple, informative, and engaging way to get involved with service projects.

LENS is an image-scanning based Android application that uses crowd sourced/rated information to create an objective, fluid experience. Users scan 2D media in the real world with a smartphone camera to instantly retrieve related information. Our design was generated through market research, interviews, task analyses and an iterative prototyping/testing process. Results from feedback indicate that users aren’t willing to spend much time looking up information while on the move. LENS will always be faster than competing applications because it doesn’t require the user to do any superfluous work.

Adults spend too much time alone instead of flourishing in interpersonal environments. Young adults age 18 to 24 spend an average of three hours per day watching television, and an additional six hours monitoring online media. The same age group enjoys merely three hours a day interacting with their peers in a social setting. We have engineered Let’s Do Something, a comprehensive mobile application designed for the Android platform that presents the user with an intuitive tool to suggest social and active ideas in the Seattle area.  From abstract art to weightless free falling, our database is already populated with over 50 unique and interesting adventures. Through usability research we have already found that one in three people have found activities they haven’t indulged in, but would love to experience. Our peers have voted Let’s Do Something as more intuitive, better architected, and ultimately more useful than similar existing applications. What separates Let’s Do Something from our competitors is the ability for our fan base to submit fun and enticing ideas to our moderated and ever growing database. Our application doesn’t suggest mundane and ordinary plans like our rivals. Instead, we offer memorable outings and experiences that even the most reserved person will be excited to participate in. The Let’s Do Something application is the key for our generation to rebuild relationships with their loved ones, have fun with friends, and exercise important interpersonal skills lost in this day and age.

CommunityConnect is an interactive application licensed by King County Library System (KCLS) that uses geographic information systems (GIS) technology to map market segmentation data, library circulation data, and census data in order to help librarians pinpoint areas of potential outreach in their communities. However, KCLS administrators determined that librarians have been struggling to apply it at their branches. We conducted a needs assessment, via an online survey, face-to-face interviews, and observations, to identify the obstacles preventing librarians from successfully using the software. Based on our findings, we produced an in-depth analysis of CommunityConnect’s uses at one KCLS branch to serve as a model for other branches in the future. We also developed a set of recommendations for future training on CommunityConnect.

Mood Journal is a web application that allows mental health patients to log their daily moods and behavior in order to help their therapists to better treat them. This project was inspired by the observation that when patients arrive in mental health clinics, they are given questionnaires to fill out that ask them about moods and behavior in the past two weeks. Considering how fleeting and variable moods can be in such a long span of time, it’s impossible for an individual to accurately answer these questions. Therapists often rely on these questionnaires to both diagnose the patient and to help guide the therapy session. It therefore becomes crucial that the responses are as true to the patient’s state as possible. Mood Journal addresses this issue by prompting users to fill out a 3 question, scaled survey every day, asking about their mood, physical energy level and enjoyment of activities. If their survey score is below a certain threshold then they are asked to fill out a short questionnaire that further inquires about their behavior for that day. Mood Journal displays past logs to patients for them to observe trends in their mood and also allows them to send messages to their therapist if they have concerns. In addition, if a patient is experiencing an extreme low, they are redirected to the necessary resources while the therapist is notified. We hope that with our tool, mental health services will run more smoothly and accurately than ever.

Finding parking in Seattle has always proved to be a significant challenge. We, Team Wildfish, created Seattle ParkIt to address this issue. We have developed an Android application that will allow users to search for and locate parking in the Seattle area based on when and where they would like to park. Basing our design choices around user testing, our app is designed to make parking fast and easy. We are leveraging the Seattle Department of Transportation’s parking sign database as a data source. Initially we have an app designed for parking in Seattle, but ideally this can be expanded to cities both around the state and the country.