Do you ever feel like you'd be lost without your phone, or find it hard to put it down? Are you curious to know what it’s like to be a little less dependent on your phone and a little more in charge of how and when you use it? Transcend provides a fun, simple way to help college students take control of their technology use and explore new life experiences. You earn and achieve badges while recording focused time engaged in a range of self-selected activities, challenges, and reflections. Experience a sense of accomplishment by charting your activities and cultivating time management skills. Gain control of your technology use by monitoring your usage hours everyday. Gain personal insight by reflecting on your technology habits. Transcend provides a self-directed method for helping you to shift the balance in your life from app-dependence to app-enablement.

While there are many websites to book flights, cars, and accommodation, not many help in creating an itinerary for vacation. TripTips is a website that minimizes the agony of travelers by getting locals at the destination to plan their trip. As part of the capstone, we are adding a new feature to the website that would allow users to effortlessly plan their travel on a map-based and a calendar-based canvas. It would be designed to be shareable on social media to allow multiple users to collaborate and edit the itinerary. This shareability and the potential virality that can result from it, would make TripTips more familiar to travelers and lead to an increased user base. Through our capstone project, we are making TripTips stand out from the crowd with its unique travel planning feature that would be user-friendly and flexible, and would give users a reason to engage with the company for their travel planning needs.

TuneBI: Mobile Marketing Visualization Fei Guo, Yanling Hu, Xiaojuan Wu, Jun Fan (Full-Time MSIM) Sophisticated marketers use TUNE BI (Business Intelligence) to extend their analytics capabilities without the traditional time, expenses, and risk of developing their own business intelligence platform. We worked with TUNE, one of the best mobile applications tracking company in the world, to develop and enhance the visualization experiences of the new TUNE BI services. The new TUNE BI dashboards consist of many Key Performance Indicators such as Return on Investment per Ad campaign and publisher, Average Revenue Per User and Cost of New User Acquisition, and many more. TUNE BI dashboards take out the hassle of understanding analytics, and help marketers and executives to focus on making quick and effective decisions.

When friends and family go out to eat, they can have difficulties determining what restaurants that they should go to because everyone can have different tastes and values. Turnip allows you to find good restaurants that have meal choices that fit your diet, even if they don’t specifically cater to you. Without our service, an individual would have to go through every restaurant’s website, find their menu, and parse out the information. Turnip users can search for a food item and filter the results by our four main categories: vegan, vegetarian, dairy-free, and gluten-free. A grid of pictures of restaurants that have food that match their search will show up with their address, contact information, and operating hours. The user can then click on the photos to look at each dish that satisfy their diet.

At UW, commuters have a tough time trying to find parking at campus parking lots & garages and pay for higher parking rates. Drivers get stuck in redirect loops and often have difficulty coordinating carpools. Our solution to this issue is a mobile application called “Parking Hero”. Our application provides commuters with information about which parking lots are full and which aren’t ahead of time so they can head straight to an open lot from the start, saving time and stress. It also allows them to connect with other commuters to coordinate carpooling to get the cheaper carpooling rate. This application will help decrease the congestion of UW parking lots and garages and improve the amount of carpoolers to UW campus.

University of Washington (UW) Libraries supports both online and residential users with an abundance of resources and services. However, users often struggle with how to access, use, and apply these tools. As a means to support these users, UW Libraries created a “How Do I” guide. But as time went on, the guide became outdated, difficult to navigate, and time-consuming to use. In collaboration with the UW Libraries Online Learning Subcommittee, we developed an FAQ, targeting the most common struggles affiliated with using UW Libraries research tools and other affiliated tasks. The result is an FAQ that is up-to-date and easy for the user to navigate. Documentation created by the Capstone Team enables librarians to quickly and easily update the guide as needed, matching the language, styling and functional layout already in place. Moving forward, UW Libraries is well equipped with a sustainable, yet adaptable source for users to consult.

The current user experience (UX) landscape has seen a shift from the classic days of Garrett and Norman. UX designers invariably experiment with approaches resulting in a slew of methodologies. In an effort to unify the best practices among these, we devised a model that encompasses strategic alignment of organizational resources, market trend analysis and stakeholder buy-in. To pilot test our hypothesis we worked with University of Washington Information Technology (UW-IT) on redesigning the online course registration system. By performing a heuristic evaluation and connecting with users to understand the as-is system, we envisioned what the to-be system needs to accomplish. A proposal was prepared to seek management approval. Thus through the application of the model we were able to provide UW-IT with a feasible design proposal that met user and organizational needs. The pilot test indicates that this methodology provides an effective UX strategy that can help reduce development cost.

A joint venture of Microsoft and Accenture, Avanade is a global company that delivers technical solutions to enterprise businesses. This technology driven company resolved to revitalize their recruitment methods and create a more tech savvy presence at career fairs by creating a digital application to collect candidate information. Our team’s project was to design and develop a Windows 8 application for Avanade that electronically collects candidate information and aggregates applicant information into a format that can be easily shared between Avanade employees and systems. Our goal for the application was not only to produce a convenient information management tool for Avanade recruiters, but also to contribute to creating a high quality first impression for Avanade candidates. With this project, we have successfully provided Avanade a proof of concept on which they can expand and make more accommodating for use in their international locations.