Employee scheduling is a crucial task for most organizations regardless of their size. Currently, the Public Services team at SPL manually prepares the schedules of their employees using Microsoft Excel and Sharepoint. This manual process takes a lot of time and effort to create as well as manage schedules. We conducted research to build a flexible solution providing user-friendly interface and easy customizations. This solution would enable the scheduling team to be agile in creating and changing schedules as per the library branches’ requirements, thus enabling resource optimization and quick decision making.

Seattle Children’s Hospital offers many resources that can make a significant difference in the quality of life for patient families. Ranging from food banks, to gas reimbursement, to unit food delivery, these critical resources are hidden within the information architecture of their website. Our mission is to centralize available resources so families can easily find resources relevant to their situations. The addition of a family resources tab allows families to quickly and easily discover, identify, and utilize the resources available.

As more industries leverage real-time 3D creation, new roles with skill sets geared towards this technology are emerging all the time. For Unreal Engine, this generates an audience of learners with diverse and unique information needs. Unreal Engine taxonomy is the basis for unifying learning materials across sources. By providing standardized terms for Unreal Engine components, it is easier to surface relationships between various learning sources such as webinars, documentation, and online learning courses. Relating this taxonomy with learning skills through ontology strengthens paths and connects users in emerging roles with the learning materials they need.

Feeding a growing population is a global challenge which strains food, water, and energy. CITYFOOD is a research project investigating a solution - integrating aquaponic systems into urban environments. Aquaponics is an innovative and resource-efficient agriculture method that combines aquaculture with hydroponics, yielding two sources of food while reducing the resource footprint and ecological impact. To research and scope its viability, researchers require a standardized vocabulary; shared resources; peer-reviewed information; and international collaboration. To facilitate this, we built a robust online portal of applied research, where academics, community leaders, and practitioners can go to research, locate farms, and review best practices.

EthnoMed, a web-based resource for healthcare providers to learn medical and cultural information about immigrants and refugees, has been struggling with its poor user experience. By identifying target user groups, digging into users’ pain points with extensive user research, crafting and iterating the website based on users’ feedback, Team Infothusiast came up with a refreshed design - EthnoMed 2.0. The new design not only brings a new look and feel to the site, but also improves the site’s information architecture and navigation, allowing providers to find information easily and quickly, thus attracting and retaining more users to the website.

As Washington Trails Association’s (WTA) hiking guides and user-submitted trip reports are mostly created by those who have been a part of the outdoor community for a long time, there is often a natural and unconscious bias imbedded within the information resource. This project helped WTA gain insights on how they can effectively design a content standard for their user-generated Trip Reports so that in turn, the system can be more inclusive, empowering, collaborative, and accessible. Some proposed solutions were to incorporate enhanced search capabilities of trip reports, trip reporter identifiers, and a revised trip reporting framework for quick reporting.

Missoula Public Library in Missoula, MT is building a new library website for 2020. Our capstone team sought to better understand the content, context, and users of the library’s website to improve the information architecture. We restructured the global navigation to have a topical organization scheme and eliminated ambiguous terms. We also developed a written report with a summary of our research, recommended information architecture, best practices going forward, and curated data for future analyses. The result being a "digital branch" that builds community, enhances library services, and saves the time of the user.

Moving is a painful and time-consuming process for companies and customers alike. Movher is a female owned moving and packaging firm based in Spokane. They have a track record of customer satisfaction; however, their own employees find it difficult to plan and organize moves. Currently, they are using several inflexible data management tools to estimate, dispatch, and move. Out solution unifies this process by implementing tiered authentication, integrated payment processing, automated estimation and singular calendar. All the necessary information is kept consistent and each employee has access to their data when and where they need it.

Create a system that acts as an intermediary between ShakeAlert earthquake warnings and the public, such as schools in Washington State. The system broadcasts earthquake warnings and aftermath effects related to earthquakes in a fast and reliable manner such that students and faculty can take appropriate actions to protect themselves. The system can be easily adopted to target different groups such as first responders and families. In addition, the system determines some baseline latency metrics between different components to offer a comparison between different solutions and evaluate the efficiency in broadcasting ShakeAlert information.

Students in all walks of life want to ensure they get the most out of studying. Often, the availability of study materials is limited by the time investment required of instructional designers and the students themselves. Perceptia is an automated tool that uses content analysis, NLP and knowledge graphs to create study materials based on user-provided texts, multimedia content, links to websites or a search phrase. Students can complete generated assessments to identify topics they need to spend more time studying and track progress towards mastery of topics.