CuriosityBased fosters curiosity within the workplace to help teams and companies build trust, collaboration, and communication. One of their tools is an assessment based on their 7 Forms of Respect™ framework. This framework helps individuals identify how individuals and teams demonstrate respect in the workplace. Their previous system for calculating and visualizing assessment answers was manual and extremely tedious. Our team was asked to automate this process and redesign the results delivery. The resulting product will save time for the CuriosityBased team and allow them to put more effort into services and consulting.

Unlike most major tech companies and public institutions, DOL does not have a standard privacy or data maturity assessment form for program-level use. DOL has studied models from cities like Seattle and commercial enterprises but found that none of the existing models fit their needs. The final deliverable of our project is the survey tool designed for review and adoption by Washington DOL. The survey tool will act as a preliminary check for current data governance practices at DOL, help DOL reinvent data privacy and stewardship standards, and serve as a foundation for WA DOL's future Privacy Impact Assessments.

The prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the US has been growing despite it being preventable through lifestyle changes. Unclear communication between healthcare providers and diabetes prevention programs makes it challenging for people at risk to seek and receive the help they deserve. Building off our sponsor’s alpha of a web-based matching application, we met an epidemiologist, an economist, healthcare providers, and prior participants of the Medicare’s Diabetes Prevention Program (MDPP) to make the web application more accessible. GetMDPP provides a way for at-risk individuals to be informed about and connect to MDPP and change their lives for the better.

Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning platform is currently experiencing a growth in its number of users, creating an area of opportunity to sustain these incoming users month over month. We explored this opportunity by using a hypothesis validation framework to examine what efforts can be made to improve customer retention, focusing on customers who are still in the early stages of their development. Through this framework, we were able to identify key user behaviors and pain points that led to churn. These findings have been used to suggest changes to the platform to improve product experiences and usability for customers.

A 2019 CDC report states that 35% of Americans living with a disability suffer from a condition that directly affects their ability to navigate webpages and platforms. And there aren’t nearly enough websites that address that accessibility problem. Smartsheet was invested in changing that and wanted to kickstart research on improving the accessibility and usability experience of its resource management platform - 10,000ft. As part of our solution, we studied impacted user groups, the issues they encountered, and created a framework to address accessibility problems in the future.

Dating games are interactive electronic games that touch upon complex, real-world issues such as successfully navigating relationships, achieving healthy emotional intimacy, and exploring gender and sexual identities. However, conventional game tagging does not reflect the nuances of the genre or serve player information needs. To address this, we developed a taxonomy that is more inclusive of queer themes and can be adapted for both user-facing and back-end game cataloging purposes. We refined it with feedback from user interviews and industry professionals and applied it to create an online repository of dating games that serves as an information hub for players.

The pandemic affected almost every part of our lives, especially social services that were delivered in person. We conducted a longitudinal research study interviewing 20 Washington State public librarians during the pandemic and tracked how their programming shifted throughout the year. We found three main themes that surfaced in our data – job satisfaction, changes to programming, and rethinking the profession once the world is "back to normal." We plan to ultimately disseminate our findings in a published paper to help librarians learn successful programming options to meet the needs of their communities.

The fashion industry is the second largest polluter in the world. A large contributor that many people buy into is fast fashion. We found that college students often participate in fast fashion due to practicality and lack of knowledge on the negative environmental and societal impacts. To raise awareness and encourage sustainable habits, we created a Google Chrome extension called Root that rates clothing brands based on their sustainable and ethical practices. Root also provides users suggestions for alternatives and more in-depth information on our ratings.

The Worcester Public Library’s intranet, or SHP, is underutilized, outdated, disorganized, and not intuitive for its users. The absence of an effective, centralized communication and knowledge-sharing platform makes it difficult for staff to access the information they need to meaningfully assist and inform the community. We delivered a two-phase consultative report to guide redesigning the SHP, detailing best practices, user research findings, a redesigned intranet concept, and change and organizational management recommendations. Our project uncovered communication deficiencies and provided the WPL with a framework for redesigning and implementing a new intranet. Improved staff communication will facilitate overall community engagement.