Data.wa.gov is a digital catalog of open data and consists of a collection of data sets and visualizations uploaded by independent authors. These assets have nearly 1,200 tags applied to them as user input is uncontrolled, leading to numerous duplicates and variants that have reduced the effectiveness of the tags as a whole. We created a tag protocol that consists of defined rules and edge cases along with a dashboard and future recommendations. This solution provides structure to their tag list, and increases data quality, searchability of assets, and sustainability, by reducing tag maintenance and preserving tag effectiveness.

HEALWA is an online medical library for healthcare professionals hosted by the UW Health Sciences Library via a contract with the Washington State Department of Health. HEALWA sponsored this capstone project with the goal to increase visibility and accessibility of its resources to better serve the information needs of its users. The project encompassed the curation of eBooks for 12 of its existing professional toolkits, creation of 3 new interdisciplinary toolkits, and drafting of 4 blog articles on the online library's news page. The enhanced and newly created toolkits have the potential to facilitate research for Washington State's healthcare professionals.

Freelancers face numerous challenges regarding being easily recruited for work opportunities within the rapidly growing and competitive esports industry. FAE (“For Anything Esports”) is an all-in-one resource that highlights esports freelancers by giving them a dedicated platform to showcase their expertise, experience, and availability. FAE also caters to esports organizations by providing a directory consisting of unique freelancing roles for candidates to be easily identifiable and recruited for opportunities. By providing our platform to both freelancers and organizations, we are minimizing the issues that are commonly found in the esports industry, such as unfair compensation and lack of marketability.

The guide created for this capstone project aims to educate artists and creatives on the importance of file management while providing a guide for implementation. The survey sent out to artist communities found that artists (1) have a limited understanding of information organization, (2) do not follow an organization system, and (3) feel that information organization is essential. These results inspired the creation of a how-to guide for artists to follow and implement into their creative profession. The guide educates on various information organization topics specific to art and creative use with modeled examples.

This project addressed the challenge of organizing and providing searchability for previously inaccessible student projects from eight years of the LIS 536 Metadata for Interactive Media course, which builds on the work of the UW GAME Research Group. With the goal of collocating projects on a broad level for high recall, we built a controlled vocabulary for tagging projects. Then, we set up the repository on Open Science Framework and created governance and usage documents. This repository and searching system improves students' and researchers' ability to explore completed projects so that they can utilize and build upon that work.

Trying to find information can be tough, especially when a website has lots of product offerings. Microsoft Learn users are facing difficulty because of the myriad of information, confusing UI, and lack of filter options. We conducted in-depth user research with surveys, interviews, and analysis and rendered 5 evidence-based solutions to improve the search experience on Microsoft Learn. Further, We developed an end-to-end roadmap to implement these recommendations and visualized them with a high-fidelity prototype. We expect these changes to provide improved content quality and relevance along with ease of use, saving significant time for the users.

More than ⅓ of small businesses lack social media accounts, despite it being one of the most popular resources for discovering new restaurants. Rather than needing to spend time learning complex interfaces, Munch is a user-friendly web app that enables small restaurants to upload content and improve visibility. Munch allows restaurants in Seattle’s University District to post updates, events, and promotions to a shared community Instagram page. Our Instagram page engages current and potential customers by providing a stream of content from multiple restaurants, fostering stronger customer relationships, and broadening audience reach.

Open Data Portal Metric Performance Dashboard aims to enhance the transparency and accessibility of Washington State's open data program, data.wa.gov, through the design and implementation of a performance indicator dashboard. This project involves building robust data pipelines for automatic data updates, defining and calculating precise metrics, and visualizing these metrics using Tyler's built-in tool. Furthermore, a GitHub repository will be established for efficient code maintenance and dashboard documentation. The outcome will be a comprehensive, user-friendly platform showcasing the performance and value of Data.Wa's public data assets.

Starfish Space worked with our team to redesign their data platform. Starfish Space engineers and analysts interact with hundreds of files with many different data visualizations every day without a modern, easy-to-use platform to organize and navigate their data. Anemone is an updated data visualization platform enabling Starfish Space employees to read and analyze satellite mission data faster to support future satellite missions with more efficiency and customizability.