In March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Washington State Library collected data on service disruptions across the state’s public libraries. We have built on this effort by curating, enriching, and tidying the information in this dataset — adding variables to transform it into a time series, filling in missing values, and archiving the digital sources we referenced for each observation. Our curated dataset and supporting materials, published on the Washington State open data portal, will serve as a comprehensive record to shed light on this historical moment and inform future research and emergency response planning.

Our team worked with Adios COVID and their Partners to create a reliable and convenient resource for the Hispanic community within Washington to ultimately put more vaccination shots in arms. Our goals were to support this ongoing project by improving the features and designs that were urgently needed to be pushed on to the web page. Specifically, we focused on simplifying the user interface and providing tools through different forms of research to improve the design of every feature of the application.

Color Vision Deficiency (CVD) is a reduced ability to distinguish colors, which currently affects 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women globally. Individuals with CVD reported that they’ve faced judgments from their peers and teachers, especially in their teen years. However, few products in the current market address this issue. Thus, we aimed to help teenagers with CVD achieve reconciliation with themselves so that they can cope with CVD in a healthy way. We developed an interactive journal game about the emotional journey taken by a boy with color vision deficiency named Bobby — A Colorful View.

An increasing portion of the US population prefer making investments in companies or funds to achieve financial returns as well as positive social or environmental impacts. This is especially true for Muslim investors, who currently have few options for investing in a way that aligns with their religious beliefs. The financial health tool on the Aghaz Investments app allows customers to assess their financial situations by responding to questions which help generate a financial health score and then provide specific tips and recommendations on how users can improve.

Social media companies are notoriously known for storing immense amounts of users’ personal data. While many social media sites do provide an option to view and download your data, the data is often given in raw formats, which can be overwhelming or hard to understand for the average user. Our project aims to analyze users’ downloaded data, and output it as data visualizations that are much more informative and intuitive. We hope that Aware will help people become more aware about what data is being stored about them and become incentivized to be more cautious about their online behavior.

Seasonal Affective Disorder affects more than 15 million people in the U.S., with women four times more likely to be diagnosed than men. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic makes more people live with limited social interaction and reduced sun exposure, which are leading factors that could cause/exacerbate SAD. Better Weather is a web app which helps SAD sufferers combat their symptoms with proven interventions. Through its different feature pages, users have the chance to foster connectedness & peer support, relieve stress, increase exposure to sunlight, and ultimately improve their mood.

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.