Despite 'Open-Plan' workspace having its stimulating collaboration and teamwork, it has many issues that trouble employees daily. Through the team’s research and analysis, we found out that noisy environments, lack of privacy, personalization, and health concerns are some of the major issues in an 'Open-Plan' workspace, and that workers of different job functions have different levels of dissatisfaction for 'Open-Plan' workspaces. Our design idea is a private/quiet space lookup system with real-time updates on the office spaces’ condition so that the workers can navigate within the office accurately based on their needs for privacy or quietness.

The Seattle Squeeze makes its transportation system strained. Although people are recommended to utilize Park and Ride facilities, they get frustrated when they do not know parking availability until they arrive. Our team EveREST addresses this information problem through providing real-time parking availability information. We gathered data from 686 users and designed a user-centered data pipeline. We collected real-time data through sensors, processed streaming data through cloud database, and visualized dynamic data through web application. Our solution not only helps users have equitable access to parking information, but also helps transit agencies make more effective decisions to solve Seattle traffic challenges.

Many companies communicate with their users in much more casual and conversational language than the formal English taught in schools. This casual writing style may help companies seem more approachable, but they may also seem to lack professionality and trustworthiness. In this study we are interested in how language formality affects people’s reactions in security-related interfaces. Through an online quantitative study we will explore these effects as well as how people perceive the formality of some major companies. Our findings could be used by companies to decide what tone they want to address users with to accomplish their security goals.

Climate Change is a clear and present danger to the world we live in today. A community-level collaboration movement is the need of the hour across the world that can bring about a significant change towards the behavior and attitude of people who are still skeptical about our impact on the planet. Our vision is to create sustainable and collaborative technologies for the environment that can help drive our mission for encouraging people to collect data(images) about our environment. To achieve this mission, we have developed an online platform to collaborate with citizen science communities around the world.

As Starbucks increases its drink lineup, with currently over 90 beverages, beverage recipe cards have become increasingly important learning and reference materials. We worked with Starbucks stakeholders and baristas to explore how beverage recipe cards are used across physical and digital platforms. We created information architecture and standardization recommendations, metadata, content models, and dictionaries to steer recipe card sharing and development. By standardizing the content and organization of recipe cards, we improve the barista learning experience and move towards making beverage recipe and preparation information interoperable data resources to empower other business activities, such as supply ordering and efficiency studies.

The Oregon Chapter of The Nature Conservancy has an overwhelming amount of data. There are few standards for data management and lack of best practices. This has led to data being haphazardly stored across both cloud storage and local storage. Our solution to standardize data practices and encourage the use of cloud storage will improve data flow and organization. The goal is to improve how data is shared throughout the chapter, and cut down on the time it takes for members to find what they’re looking for, thereby increasing productivity chapter-wide.

The motivation for undertaking this study was twofold: I wanted to determine millennials' utilization of FinTech apps, and if this has any impact on their financial literacy. Therefore, I analyzed academic and industry literature around millennials and FinTech usage trends, analyzed publicly available Venmo transactions to assess financial literacy, and performed user research on millennials to gain a deeper understanding of their views on FinTech apps and their perceptions of financial literacy. Ultimately, I determined that while millennials use FinTech very frequently, it doesn’t impact their financial literacy and that FinTech apps solidify existing financial habits instead of changing them.

The personnel at West Pierce Fire and Rescue rely on SharePoint for their centralized information storage and sharing platform. This project sought to analyzing the current website content, identify users’ satisfaction with the current site, and incorporate user feedback to help improve user experience and searching capabilities on the site. A written report to the department included a summary of the research findings, a topical overview of updated files, user-friendly wireframes, and a moving forward document highlighting additional recommendations to help improve the overall design and information sharing opportunities on the SharePoint site.

Outreach is a web-application that bridges the communication gap between immigrant parents and middle school teachers to aid in student learning. We realize that when parents are engaged in their children’s academic lives, students are more often to excel. Teachers will be able to communicate with parents through a web application enabling them to send out weekly messages to encourage conversation within the home. Our goal as a collective is to create a family inclusive environment for immigrant parents that struggle to get their children to college.

How might we plan user-friendly entrances for the library? For this project, we learned about and applied service design tools at UC Berkeley’s new Center for Connected Learning to provide library leadership with input on a redesigned entry experience. After learning about service design, we created six fictional personas and walked them through different entry scenarios to examine each step. Then we created easy-to-understand graphics to provide the UC Berkeley leadership team with planning materials. Any library can use service design tools to improve the experience of its users.