iSchool Capstone

Award Winner

2013

Patchwork: A Quilt of Conversations About What Really Matters

In a world without Patchwork, companies that operate unethically continue to make profits, and companies that make ethical choices are not rewarded enough. With no reliable way to investigate what really goes on inside corporations, consumers make purchasing decisions only based on prices and personal reviews. Enter Patchwork: a site that enables people to share, discuss, and rate facts related to companies and products. When a user finds an article pertaining to compelling positive or negative practices of a business or organization, they can post the article to Patchwork for others to discuss and rate. Patchwork will encourage companies to improve their practices or keep up their good work in an effort to attain the highest possible score. We conducted surveys and user studies and found that users would like to know more about what goes on behind the scenes of companies and products. Patchwork will enable people to be more knowledgeable consumers in a world where things are not always what they seem.

Perception and Quality of Spoken Message v. Texting

Gibberin, a spoken message application for iOS, is an effective alternative to texting. Using Gibberin as a voice communicator with no transcription to text allows recipients to listen instead of read. My research project compares the effectiveness of texting and spoken message in terms of speed and quality. Through interviews and usability testing, spoken message seemed to be the more effective communication medium, but is it the preferred method of communication remains to be seen. We have seen voice-to-text change the way users communicate. By taking the next step in changing how we communicate, the value of simplicity and efficiency can be modeled by Gibberin.

Rescue

Animal shelters are in need of a technological upgrade to better connect people with animals in need of homes. As the internet becomes the central hub for information exchange, nonprofit shelters now have a necessity to display available animals online. Rescue is a web and mobile application that allows users to browse adoptable animals, provides a system for shelters to create catalogues of their animals and share media with their communities to increase visibility. Based on usability testing, users were able to locate specific information faster than similar applications. Rescue strives to provide a usable and delightful platform for shelters to expose their animals in need to a larger audience.

Triage Project

Most chronically ill patients feel confused, isolated and helpless due to their chronic disease. As a result, risk for depression increases, which in return leads to even more chronic diseases. Triage Project is focused on designing and prototyping a patient based web application that would network patients with a supportive community of fellow patients, doctors, and researchers in the field. Our solution is not a standalone solution to the chronic diseases. It complements other treatments to prevent patients from suffering symptoms of depression. Triage has conducted usability surveys with chronic patients and interviews with healthcare professionals and researchers at Group Health and UW Medicine, to design and evaluate a unique patient based web application. Our next steps are to conduct surveys and interviews to assess the impact of patient based web application on depression of chronic patients.

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.

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.

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."