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2022 Undergraduate Capstone Projects

Capstone project proposal for HCDE students in the 2021-2022 academic year.

UW Applied Physics Laboratory
Accelerating Arctic Science with Amateur Photography

Arctic scientists work in some of the most remote areas of the world, collecting data during short seasons across vast territories. Currently, scientists work with local communities on a variety of citizen science projects, but the communities are widely dispersed and therefore cover only a fraction of the region. The Arctic is undergoing rapid physical and biological transformation associated with climate warming (as is the Antarctic), including changes in the behavior, health, and distribution of wildlife such as polar bears, seals, and whales. Tracking wildlife populations, as well as changes in the sea-ice and glacial habitats they use, is crucial for understanding the impacts of climate warming and conserving Arctic wildlife.
 
Increasingly, there is a tourism industry in the Arctic (and Antarctic), with expedition ships of paying passengers (some associated with National Geographic) visiting regions that are too dispersed and logistically challenging for scientists to access. Photography is an important part of tourist expeditions, and on each trip, passengers could capture up to a million photos or more. These digital photos contain not just images of wildlife (polar bears feeding, penguins breeding), terrain, and weather – they also include metadata such as GPS locations and date stamps which can help scientists make better sense of the information in the images.
 
The challenge is how to unlock the potential of this massive photographic data set. For this project, we want to determine which questions biologists have about the Arctic that can be addressed by photography (there are remote video and photo tracking projects in each region, also creating data sets), and understand what would help inspire passengers to share their photos for science via a mobile app, website, or other mechanism. This work should build upon, and fill gaps in, existing citizen science projects in the Arctic. You’ll have an opportunity to learn about the capabilities of computer vision and machine learning and how those might also play a part in accelerating polar research. We’re looking for creative ideas on how to close the loop between this ‘accidental data’ and Arctic science! 

Target users
Arctic scientists and (b) passengers on board Arctic expedition ships
User-centered design components
User research, design research, ideation, prototyping, evaluation, potential implementation

Microsoft
Microsoft Community Re-Design

Conduct an in-depth user research study of the Microsoft Community website visitors. Prepare a user research plan, conduct user research interviews with 8-10 users, and generate a list of recommended changes. Provide product concepts that address unmet user needs that were uncovered in this research. 

The Microsoft Community forum is visited by millions of users per month. We know little about these users’ help or learning intent, their journey before arriving to our site, their experience at the site, other community forums they use, etc. To better serve and delight these users we aim to learn: 

  • More about the audiences using Microsoft Community. 
  • What specific help, support or learning task are they trying to accomplish? 
  • What is the user’s higher-level goal in mind when visiting Microsoft Community? (e.g. Goal: “Start my own business”, Task: “I need help setting up an Outlook account for my business.”)  
  • What was their expectation when deciding to visit Microsoft Community? 
  • How was their experience at Microsoft Community? 
  • What elements or experiences using Microsoft Community did they find helpful, not helpful, or surprising? 
    • What was frustrating? 
    • What would they change? 
  • Did they ultimately accomplish their help, support, or learning intent? 
  • Did they visit other help or learning sites, forums, community sites, etc?
    • Which ones?
    • How did they discover them?
    • What are their likes and dislikes?

In addition, we would like to learn more about the site visitor profiles and characteristics including: 

  • The role that information work or productivity technology plays in their work, life and/or school. 
  • Their technology usage and confidence level 
  • The challenges or constraints they have when using productivity technology. 
  • When they need help or want to learn more about how to use technology, what types of other resources do they typically use and find the most helpful?  
    • Explore each scenario: help Vs learning.  
    • Depending on their scenario, do the resources they prefer to use change? (Resource examples: YouTube videos, 3rd party forums, search and read articles on the Internet, ask a colleague, support agent, friend, take as self-paced training, etc.) 
    • What attributes do they look for in the resource?
    • If they use other community forums what do they like/dislike? 
  • This user profile information could be delivered in the form of ‘personas’ and/or ‘mindsets’.  The results of this research will identify top user concerns, areas for improvement and recommend site capabilities or user experience changes. When designing this study, the project team may choose to conduct surveys, user interviews, ethnography, diary studies, and user experience tests. 

Website
https://answers.microsoft.com
Target users
Microsoft customers who need help or want to learn more about how to use Office, Windows, and Surface products
User-centered design components  
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Evaluation

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Proxi (Formerly Map Your Idea)
Envisioning the Future of Curated Maps: An Exploration of Proxi.Co for Consumers

Help Proxi take local, curated guides of what to do and where to go — currently hosted on the Proxi platform — and make them more useful to end users. 

About Proxi (formerly Map Your Idea): Proxi is powering the future of personalized navigation. Today, Proxi makes mapping and crowdsourcing geographic data and recommendations accessible to everyone. In the short term, Proxi helps creators and local, trusted guides monetize their location-based content. In the future, Proxi beats out platforms like TripAdvisor by prioritizing trusted, local guides over reviews of the masses. The guides and content on Proxi will power future immersive and built-world experiences.

Today, hundreds of local maps have been created on Proxi. From a crowdsourced Trick-or-Treat map that made it onto Good Morning America to a guide built by local vloggers, Traveling while Black in Seattle, to help Black visitors find welcoming restaurants and activities in the area, Proxi is powering personalized recommendations in a new, map-first way. Up until now, the Proxi team has heavily focused on the UX and map making process fo the creators. Now, as more maps are being made on the platform, it is time to focus on the Human Centered Design for the map viewers and fans. 

This project will walk through user research, design, prototype and evaluation all in an effort to build a consumer (or fan) focused technology that will allow everyday users and travelers to save, layer and contribute to these maps. We will figure out what user needs are as they make decisions like “where to eat tonight” or “what to do with my kids this weekend” and ideate on how these curated guides could help and how they should be presented. 

Proxi is currently a participant in the prestigious Techstars Seattle accelerator. The CEO is a current (but on leave) HCDE PhD Student and is eager to interact with students and mentor them about startups. 

Website
Proxi.Co
Target users
We increasingly have influencers and local media companies creating a sharing Proxi guides in the Seattle and Austin area. Yet the end user experience for the consumers is less than ideal. For this project we will ideate, prototype and evaluate how end users (fans of these influencers) can better save, share and layer these curated guides for custom, useable, and delightful experience. 
User-centered design components  
Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Evaluation

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Dropbox, Inc
How Gen Z students work on creative projects

The project team will map out the current steps and tools that Gen Z students uses to collect, organize and share content. The team will then ideate/ co-create solutions to pain points and needs identified.

Dropbox is interested to learn more about how a new generation of creators go about their day to day creative work. 

Students would design and implement a research program based around identifying insights and behavioral trends relating to how Gen Z students undertake creative projects for personal, education or professional work - looking at both their online and offline workflows. 

After identifying insights and trends, students will then ideate solutions for the opportunity areas identified in the research and undertake some co-design sessions with Dropbox designers to bring some of the ideas to life. 

Website
dropbox.com
Target users
Gen Z students working on personal or professional creative projects
User-centered design components  
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Evaluation

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University of Washington School of Nursing
Adapting TB digital adherence tools for HIV/PrEP adherence support

We have identified initial feature preferences from patients, experts, and conducted formative research to develop personas of various potential user types including goals, needs, pain points, and behaviors, and mapped patient flows to identify where and how the tools will have impact. We will adapt and expand our existing DAT platform to support a new POC TFV test and meet the needs of PrEP or ART clients for home- or community-based testing.

Despite the availability and effectiveness of oral antiretroviral therapy (ART) for people living with HIV (PLWH) to suppress viral replication and oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to reduce the risk of HIV acquisition monitoring, measuring and improving drug adherence remains challenging. Tenofovir-based regimens make up 90% of ART and all of PrEP for the near future. ART/PrEP providers have relied on self-reported adherence, which is often inaccurate and unreliable and has led to inefficient counseling and poor supportive care. Clinician assessment is generally no better than chance predictions. An objective, real-time assessment of adherence can prompt immediate clinical decision-making and support for patients. Strategies to measure and understand risk of non-adherence and adherence patterns over time would allow better allocation of scarce resources such as counseling or expensive testing.

We will build on the existing experience and infrastructure of the currently developed TB-focused system to expand to HIV prevention and ART initiation. We will leverage combined strengths to adapt and refine the TB-TSTs to support the POC urine TFV test for home- or community-based adherence monitoring.

Target users
University of Washington patients and healthcare providers
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Evaluation, Implementation

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University of Washington School of Nursing
Sleep intervention in breast cancer survivors

Have you ever been long on to-do lists and short on sleep? Join our team conducting a clinical research trial of a chatbot designed to help breast cancer survivors tackle insomnia after treatment, which builds off previous HCDE capstone work. The bot is under iterative development and in need of a user-tailored, web-based solution for delivering cognitive behavioral therapy concepts and relaxation content with research-grade site analytics. Our research team is implementing a sleep intervention using a chatbot-website modality to deliver cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia in breast cancer survivors experiencing poor sleep. The project will focus on the integration of website education delivery with the chatbot just-in-time adaptive intervention components.    

Our team at UW Nursing specializes in cancer care. We are open to collaborating with HCDE students on one of the following projects:

  1. What is the best way to deliver information to breast cancer patients to enhance their sleep?  Previously, HCDE students conducted research indicating user interest in a chatbot.  Now we are looking to pair that chatbot with a user-friendly means of delivering longer-form web-based educational content to help breast cancer patients sleep better.
  2. How can we help young, gen z cancer patients improve their physical activity?  What modality is best for helping to change behavior of younger cancer patients?  What might this look like?

Target users
Breast cancer survivors
User-centered design components
User Research, Implementation

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VR Ulysses
Data Visualization in Virtual Reality

You will help VR Ulysses develop the UI/UX of their data visualization tools. Current products display generic data sets and networks.

VR Ulysses is a Seattle-based start-up and spin off from CoMotion at the University of Washington.  We are engaged in virtual reality-based data visualizations of high-dimensional data sets, focusing on network operations and cyber security teams. We have also designed a separate VR application for generic, but high-dimensional, data sets.  We would like to work with 1-2 teams of students to enhance the intuitiveness of the VR-based interfaces of our products. The ultimate goal is enable users to recognize relationships and anomalies in large, complex data sets as quickly as possible.     

Website
vrulysses.com
Target users
IT professionals and scientists
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Evaluation, Implementation

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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
SOCRATES: Complex Groundwater Data Analysis Platform

Redesign complex groundwater data analysis applications to be more usable to scientists.

We currently maintain a suite of groundwater data analysis tools used by scientists to support remediation efforts at the Hanford site. The existing tools are functional but weren't designed with usability as a top priority. These tools are all complex applications used by highly technical subject matter experts.

The full scope of the redesign will be flexible and will depend on which parts the students want to take on. HCDE students will conduct user research, interview stakeholders, redesign the existing tools to be more usable for scientists, and conduct usability tests to evaluate the effectiveness of their redesign.

Website
https://socrates.pnnl.gov/    
Target users
Scientists, Hydrologists, Groundwater remediation experts    
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Evaluation

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HCDE & ST Microelectronics
Designing a Novel Way to Create an XR Ecosystem in Seattle

HCDE and ST Microelectronics have hosted in person, XR Days twice and we believe there could be a more efficient way to create an XR ecosystem in Seattle that may or may not involve an in person event -this could involve other platforms, technologies, etc.

Can we use design thinking to create an XR ecosystem in Seattle?  Most recently, ST Microelectronics (makers of MEMS and sensors for virtual reality equipment) has made a gift donation to HCDE so that HCDE would "host" an in person event (XR Day), however this style of event may be outdated, is extremely time consuming for HCDE, does not necessarily fit with HCDE's mission or the research of HCDE faculty.  That said, there is clearly a demand for XR at UW and in Seattle (evidence by the popularity of XR Day tickets).  We would like to explore other ways to create a hub and ecosystem for XR in Seattle (and associate with ST Microelectronics' sensor products).    

Websites
https://www.hcde.washington.edu/xr-day and https://www.st.com/en/applications/virtual-augmented-reality.html    
Target users
Students, industry professionals, and academics involved in XR in the pacific northwest    
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping

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GoDaddy Digital Care
Adding a Human Element to Digital Care

How do we develop an authentic customer relationship via a digital assistance platform?     

Our award-winning GoDaddy Guides are a market differentiator. When customers contact GoDaddy via phone or chat, our Guides help sell the best solution for their needs, they help with any problem they may have, and they can predict and propose what to do next. They create relationships with customers with their humanity, friendly and conversational tone, and their smart and intuitive problem-solving. They make the lives of small business owners and entrepreneurs easier, which helps them be more successful and stay focused on making their own businesses great.  

Customers tell us they feel special and supported when they interact with our GoDaddy Guides. How do we adapt this experience for the digital space? Today, we have a utilitarian Help Center and chatbot. How can we replicate that special personalized experience that customers receive when they speak or chat with a human, when they interact with a digital assistance platform?

Website
https://www.godaddy.com/help 
Target users   
Small business owners and entrepreneurs    
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping

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Huddle Up Learning
Corporate Learning Tool

Huddle Up is a collaborative online learning platform allowing customized experiences for teams focused on the application of knowledge to share solutions (moving beyond answering quiz questions). As users share ideas and solutions, Huddle Up leverages the interactive power of qualitative and quantitative feedback to improve each user's solution as well as the overall team's understanding of the problem and possible solutions.

Our current platform (product) targets learning users consisting of classroom participants. Using research, ideation, and prototyping, we want to measure the efficacy of learning and interaction when used in a corporate setting to allow teams to be more inclusive problem-solvers compared to current online training systems which focus on passive learning by watching videos and taking quizzes. 

Our goal is to customize experiences for companies based on the outcomes they wish to see for current challenges they are facing. For example, companies may wish to improve their sales to a sagging demographic of 25-year old men. Different company teams (marketing, sales, customer support, and product development) can all be engaged at better understanding the problem and proposing solutions. We wish to measure the efficacy of this process on each team member's individual learning about the company's practices (typically covered in training modules) and the overall company's problem-solving ability to evaluating many different solutions from different perspectives in order to come up with a transparent way to determine the best path forward.

Website
www.huddleuplearning.com
Target users
Chief Learning Officers, HR Managers, Trainers, CEOs looking for a more collaborative leadership platform    
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Evaluation, Other

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Emerald Technology Group
Sustainable Geolocation data - intersection of technology and brick/mortar

GetGreen is a new app which helps people to make easy sustainable, greener choices about their lives - activities, purchases, other daily behaviors and decisions that make a measurable impact to lessen climate change.  Additionally, GetGreen partners with carbon-reducing projects, so that users can double their impact - reducing their own carbon footprint through behavior change and supporting verified sustainability projects through direct support.  A beta GetGreen will be released in early 2022.

Many of the choices we can make towards more sustainable living involve physical locations, like transportation/travel and making more knowledgeable actions given our location (e.g. choosing sustainable products from a store nearby, ordering sustainably or low-carbon sourced dining in a restaurant). The GetGreen application has a built in geo-location and geo-fencing technology to allow notifications based on a user's location.

GetGreen is soliciting a project of human-centered design insights and recommendations around optimizing this functionality:

  • Can we build/acquire a good geo location database of sustainable options in the Seattle area - vegetarian restaurants, stores with environmentally friendly products, green certified businesses, used clothing stores, etc.
  • What level could that location information go down to?  Recommending specific restaurants?   Recommending specific menu options if a user is inside a given restaurant?
  • How should this location specific recommendations best be shared with user's?   Notifications, via wearables, etc?   
  • Is user reluctance to location tracking an issue, and if so how best to overcome?
  • Related, what’s the best approach to expanding into new location areas or metropolitan regions?
  • A more narrow scope: what techniques are most effective for other “purpose/intent” type applications (like fitness, mental health, healthy eating apps)

Website
www.emeraldtechnology.net
Target users
Users of GetGreen application - in region    
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Evaluation

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Community Data Science Collective
Visualizing the ecosystem of online communities

Create and evaluate a web dashboard that visualizes information about relationships between online communities to help online community members and leaders understand their communities role in the broader online ecosystem.    

Online communities, like Subreddits hosted on Reddit.com, are an increasingly important sites of knowledge production, social support, entertainment, and political mobilization. This HCDE capstone project will involve designing and building a new interactive visual dashboard to enable members and managers of online communities to understand and monitor the relationships between their overlapping communities on Reddit. We envision that a  project will support users as they decide where to post, create new communities and craft policy that promotes complementary inter-community relationships.When completed, we plan to make the dashboard available publicly to millions of Reddit users and to conduct extensive outreach with moderators.

The dashboard will be able to draw from a series of very large datasets about activity on Reddit that have already been collected and processed. These datasets include quantitative measures of how much two communities share members, moderators, or topics and estimates of how the two communities may be competitors or may complement each other's growth. For example, this simple visualization shows clusters of Subreddits with overlapping users available here.

The project may involve a user study to identify possible approaches and/or to evaluate how well the dashboard accomplishes these intended goals. Part of this project can involve creating new types of variables that may be useful to Reddit users. In doing this work, the HCDE team will collaborate closely with the Community Data Science Collective—a multi-institution research network bringing together academic social computing and HCI researchers with participants in online communities.  The team's contact in the CDSC will be Dr. Nathan TeBlunthuis (a postdoctoral scholar at Northwestern University), who will provide ongoing support and mentorship throughout the project, build datasets to power the dashboard, deploy it on the public internet and publicize the project. If successful, the team may pursue a publication at a top Human-Computer Interaction conference (e.g., CHI 2023).

Website
https://communitydata.science    
Target users
Managers and members of online communities who will use the dashboard to understand and monitor their communities' roles in the online ecosystem.     
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Prototyping, Evaluation, Implementation

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Google
Google Maps for Global Youth

How might we design a more personalized, contextual Google Maps experience for Global Youth (18-24 y/o) users?

Global Youth are generally more socially and environmentally conscious than other generations; they are digital natives with unique user experience expectations and perceptions of authenticity.  Global Youth are drawn to parsable forms of content (ex. ephemeral videos and audio) and are content creators that contribute to both public and private/“cozy” spaces of the internet.

We are looking for a capstone team to develop research insights on Global Youth users and craft a design vision that answers the following: 

  • How do Global Youth parse information on the map?  
  • What information helps them discover new places and make decisions about where to go? 
  • For example, how can Google Maps better communicate the vibe of an area?  What types of media best convey vibe?  
  •  Should the map communicate the voice of the community?  If so, how?  
  • How might this differ across cultures and geographies?

Website
https://www.google.com/maps/about/#!/    
Target users
Google Maps Global Youth (18-24 y/o) users    
User-centered design components
User Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Evaluation

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Seasalt.ai
AMA about your Business in a Mirror World

Build a virtual assistant for every business on the planet, and experiment the best way to interact with them: in an augmented physical world, or in a realistic virtual world?    

This project explores different ways for a consumer to interact with a business: either in a physical or virtual world. For physical worlds, consumers are augmented with AR glasses, earbuds, or cellphone cameras; for virtual worlds such as inside Minecraft,  Roblox or Grand Theft Auto, consumers can explore physical store’s virtual copy -- i.e. living in a mirrorworld of the physical world.

This project aims to answer: what’s the best design to deliver the most natural experience for both the consumers and businesses? and in which world?

Websites
deck +  video    
Target users
Everyday consumers who visit stores either offline or online    
User-centered design components
Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Implementation

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nFocus Solutions
Maximizing social impact through optimized real-time data solutions

Students will work directly with the TraxSolutions Product Manager to identify optimal user experiences that will enable leaders in nonprofit and non-governmental organizations to make better decisions.  Students will analyze market needs and make recommendations for product enhancements that will provide those leaders with access to real-time data, producing deeper insights and greater awareness.    

Students will analyze our current analytics offering and identify areas that will significantly improve both the user experience and the ability of leaders within non-profit and non-governmental organizations to make better, more informed decisions.  Our focus is on providing these leaders with real-time operational data that will change the way public sector organizations collect, view and analyze data to better support their constituents and stakeholders. Students will determine how to elevate the right data to help our clients make a greater impact on the people and communities they serve, driving equitable distribution of resources and significantly improving the lives of under-served populations across America and around the world. This work will touch the lives of millions of underserved individuals, families, and communities.
We welcome you to experience our world for yourselves, by engaging with tools like TraxFacts and the clients that will be using them, sharing with us your research and UI/UX talents and learning about a vital socioeconomic sector along the way.

Students will be working directly with the TraxSolutions Product Manager as well as corporate leadership. We have sponsored multiple Capstone projects for over the last 3 years, and we know what is important -- timely access to data and people who are critical to the research, evaluation and delivery of a winning Capstone project.  

Website
https://www.nfocus.com/traxfacts/    
Target users
Non-profit leadership     
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Evaluation

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Nourishing Networks Consortium
The Nourishing Networks Core Human/Digital Integration

Develop the core of the digital components integrated with the human components of the Nourishing Networks. Create the human centered design of the digital foundation of the Nourishing Networks with virtual, digital tools, i.e., web, data, AR, VR, social media, and lay the foundations of the development and maintenance of the open standards, protocols, best practices, and guidelines that ensure the resilience, long-term effectiveness, and growth of the Nourishing Networks.

The Nourishing Networks Consortium has created a very successful model connecting people together by meeting in real life and establishing a base group called a Nourishing Network group.  This group of volunteers goes on to identify and solve problems in their community using the resources they find locally in their communities.  We created this model of interaction from our “prototype networks” that we created in Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, Issaquah, Sammamish, and Northshore regions in the Seattle area from 2012 to the present day.  

We are in the process of developing the digital foundation of this human-to-human network with virtual, digital tools, we can’t go into detail here, but that integrates and supports the human-to-human network in ways never attempted before. This will amplify, magnify, and exponentially multiply the efficiencies and impact of each individual node in the network, and the entire network itself.  A complete human centered digital network integration. 

Website
www.nourishingnetworks.net    
Target users
All demographics who are capable of engaging in local community volunteer work.  Diverse people working together to take their individual time, talents, strengths, passions, expertise, skills, and compassion and weave them together into an irrepressible force, a dynamic network creating engine that gets things done. People who have an innate passion for helping their community. They want to “show up” when the community needed their help.
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Evaluation, Implementation

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ETutorboard
Effective use of mobile systems in online education

Research and understand the pain points of teachers and students in online education. Design a comprehensive system in which the teachers can teach, assign classroom/homework, track and evaluate the assignments whereas students can learn, attend homework, and complete their course work. There are various educational platforms are available in the market most of these solutions require keyboard and bigger screens. We need a mobile based solution to address the need of hundreds of millions of students in the developing nations    

Covid-19 has impacted the lives of many students. Students in developing and underdeveloped nations struggled a lot to get proper education during this time. They do not have access to a pc, laptop, tablet, or internet connection. But interestingly a considerable portion of them have a mobile phone with a cell phone and data connection. A mobile based educational platform that connects teachers and students will help educate millions of young students and uplift them.

Research and understand the pain points of teachers and students in online education. Design a comprehensive system in which the teachers can teach, assign classroom/homework, track and evaluate the assignments whereas students can learn, attend homework, and complete their course work. There are various educational platforms are available in the market most of these solutions require keyboard and bigger screens. We need a mobile based solution to address the need of hundreds of millions of students in the developing nations.  

Website
https://www.etutorboard.com/    
Target users
students, teachers, students looking for online education    
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping

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Chime
Helping Chime members build financial literacy

Design an educational system to support Chime students with their journey to financial independence.

Design an educational system to support Chime students with their journey to financial independence. Use Use iterative, generative and evaluative research methods to understand the people and problem space to design a mobile experience that assists our members and meets their needs for by building confidence and financial literacy.

Website
https://www.chime.com/     
Target users
Students and recent graduates    
User-centered design components
User Research, Evaluation, Implementation, Other

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Chime
Supporting Chime members during emergencies

Design a system to support Chime members during emergencies like hurricanes, power outages, and pandemics.

Design a system to support Chime members during emergencies like hurricanes, power outages, and pandemics. Use iterative, generative and evaluative research methods to understand the people and problem space to design a mobile experience that ensures our members have access to the financial security they need during difficult times.

Website
https://www.chime.com/    
Target users
Everyday People

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Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center
Youth Vaping Cessation Mobile App Development

The project will consist of conducting formative and UX research with adolescents who vape in order to inform the design and development of the first ever, science-based vaping cessation intervention smartphone app for teens, based on our established iCanQuit app to help adults quit smoking cigarettes. The goal will be to research and develop interview materials and conduct formative interviews to gather data on what teens want and need in a smartphone intervention in order to quit vaping, and to provide recommendations and conduct user testing to improve the app user experience and develop the best possible adolescent vaping intervention, which will then be tested in a national research trial for teens who vape.    

Among US adolescent middle school and high school students (ages 13-17), current use of electronic cigarettes/vaping is very high: 10.5% for middle school students and 27.5% for high school students. Currently, there are no widely available and scientifically-tested interventions or randomized trials testing the efficacy of electronic cigarettes/vaping cessation interventions for adolescents. 

There is a great need for science based vaping cessation interventions for adolescents, since they are the highest risk of tobacco use addiction. Helping youth quit e-cigarettes/vaping is of the upmost importance from a population health standpoint because the nicotine in these products alters the synaptic development of the adolescent brain; harms neurodevelopment of attention, learning, mood, and impulse control; and increases the risk for future addiction to other drugs. 
We are designing the first ever app for quitting vaping, based on our previous success designing iCanQuit, a smartphone app to promote quitting cigarette smoking in adults. Our goal is to design and develop a tailored app to help adolescents quit using science-based strategies presented in a gamified context to increase engagement, accessibility, and appeal to adolescents. The outcome of the project work will inform a national research trial to test the app among teens who vape.

Website
https://research.fredhutch.org/habit/en.html    
Target users
Vaping adolescents (ages 12-17) who want to quit e-cigarettes/vaping    
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Evaluation, Implementation, Other

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Tradeoff Financial Corp
Social Networking for Traders and Investors

Work to understand specific issues and design an experience that aims to create an online social media community focusing on the needs and pain points of traders and investors. Use methods related to research and design to understand the problem area and design a desktop-based web experience that allows users to connect with other traders, discuss, learn, and understand the market.

With the advent of commission-free trading, millions of people have started trading in the stock market. This new group of traders, primarily millennials and Gen-Zers, rely more heavily on the modern social networking paradigm to aid them in understanding or making decisions related to trading. However, most mainstream social media organizations do not address the specific needs of traders, while existing online brokerage platforms are rudimentary and do not offer social networking features.

The objective for this project would be to concept an experience or service that aims to connect the advantages of social media and address traders' and investors' needs. This project would involve researching pain points, understanding how social media is used in context to trading, and designing a concept of what an ideal experience might look like.
This goal would be producing research and design deliverables around a desktop web-based experience. 

Website
https://tradeoff.com/    
Target users
Millennials and Gen-Z individuals who utilize social media in context to trading    User Research, User-centered design components
Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping

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Telescope Film
The One-Inch Barrier

Telescope Film promotes international films and series to American audience.  We'd like to better understand what the barriers are for American viewers to watching international content.    

When the Korean horror film Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020, it was the first non-American film ever to do so.  Referring to American's notorious aversion to subtitles, director Bong Joon-ho famously said,  "Once Americans get over the one-inch barrier of subtitles, they are going to discover so many more amazing films."  As a company with the mission of getting more Americans to watch international films, we strongly agree.  

The US exports vastly more content than it imports, and is known as a difficult market for international content.  And yet there are also important examples of international content having great success in the US -- most recently, Squid Game.  Attitudes may have shifted during the pandemic, when there was enormous demand for content and limited supply.  Netflix is also having a huge impact as it produces local content around the world and then distributes it globally -- many of their top-performing titles last year were international.

So things may be changing and we would like to be part of that change.  To that end, we are asking, how might we get more Americans watching international content?  Sure, subtitles might be part of the problem -- but just how big a problem are they in this age when we're constantly reading text over images onscreen (on social media, on televisions at the gym or in airports, etc.)?  Netflix is investing heavily in dubbing -- what kind of impact will that have?  What are the other barriers?  And what can we do to address them?

Website
https://telescopefilm.com/welcome    
Target users
Potential viewers of international film    
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Evaluation, Implementation, Other

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Meta (Facebook)
Creating a more inclusive, accessible Metaverse

How do we build virtual worlds that are more inclusive and accessible than real worlds?

This project can be heavily research-focused with some concept designs. Students can research existing frameworks for digital platforms on the topics of equity, diversity, and inclusion. What have these platforms done to enhance equity, diversity, and inclusion? Anything that is working well or not working well and why? What can we adapt and learn from them? How do people envision the perfectly inclusive virtual world? Students can form a POV on this topic. 
Students can design several concepts on ways to enhance equity, diversity and inclusion (e.g., avatar creation).

Website
https://www.oculus.com/facebook-horizon/     
Target users
VR enthusiasts who want to be part of the virtual world and have the ability to create in VR.
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Evaluation, Implementation

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Square Inc (Cash App) 
Social Banking Experiences with Cash App

We’re the Cash App Banking team, and our mission is to make Cash App the primary bank of choice by making banking services relatable, magically simple, and universally accessible. We want help understanding what social banking experiences would help differentiate the Cash App banking experience and drive customers to want to adopt us as their primary bank.

Cash App’s overall mission is to redefine the world's relationship with money by making money more relatable, instantly available, and universally accessible. Cash App started as a peer-to-peer payments product in 2014, and we’ve since expanded into also offering our customers banking services (e.g. debit card, checking account), in addition to investing, crypto, and more. Cash App now has 40 million monthly actives across the US. 

The Banking team’s mission is to make Cash App the primary bank of choice. This means that customers are direct depositing their paychecks into their Cash App account, they’re using their Cash Card debit card the most out of any other card in their wallet, and they’re regularly redeeming discounts at their favorite stores using Boost rewards. They’re proud to bank with Cash App and encourage friends and family to do the same.

Making banking experiences more social could introduce more customers to banking with Cash App and deepen our relationship with existing customers. We want help understanding what social banking experiences would delight customers and make them want to adopt Cash App as their primary bank. We’re looking for ideas and customer insights, and early ideas include shared savings goals and joint accounts. We’re excited to learn from your work!

Target users
Gen Z, Individuals who income that falls between $25,000-$80,000    
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation

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Individuals Standing Against Interpersonal Violence 
Sound Off

We want to create an advocacy tool that increases practical activism and legislative change through technology, education, and design. 

Our social media feeds today are saturated with infographics and updates on the current political climate. Although useful for educating the general public, calls-to-action in media rarely translate to legitimate action due to the number of barriers it takes to do so. We are proposing a project that will bridge these gaps through the use of technology, education, and design.Depending on our team and resources, we will create an app or website to achieve these purposes.

Our primary areas of interest are healthcare and interpersonal violence (IPV). As of now, we are working in parallel with the American Medical Student Association and a national coalition of student organizations in IPV advocacy. Once complete, we will mobilize members from both organizations to engage with and promote the tool.

Target users
Advocates, students, and constituents     
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Prototyping, Implementation

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Surgical Science, Inc.
Usability improvements for surgical simulation training applications

Mimic Technologies / Surgical Science makes a variety of robotic training software and hardware for surgery.  

Topics for a capstone may include any of the following projects, which can be negotiated with the student team about which is the best fit.

Use human-centered design to create (wireframes, prototype or complete product, as scope permits):

  1. A mobile app for trainees (such as surgical residents) to monitor their training progress on the robotic simulators (a web-based ""Portal"" already exists with some dashboards, but is not mobile-friendly and does not necessarily use ""best practices"" for visual display).
  2. An off-the-shelf VR headset training module to teach operating room technicians how to set up surgical robotic systems and patients in an operating room (a Unity-based prototype/demo already exists running on an Oculus for one aspect of robotic system setup, but additional applications and refinements are necessary to make this a useful training product).
  3. An application that allows surgeons to create their own augmented reality training modules from videos of surgical procedures (finished products for 5 procedures have already been developed by Surgical Science programmers, but a more efficient tool that allows users to create their own modules is desired).
  4. A data management application that allows users to customize datasets obtained from our simulators for applications like machine learning (project goal would be to create wireframes and prototypes of the application user interface)."    Mimic Technologies / Surgical Science makes a variety of robotic training software and hardware for surgery.  Several topics for a capstone are proposed, including GUI improvements, prototypes and wireframes for new application interfaces, and new VR software development.    

Website
https://mimicsimulation.com/    
Target users
Robotic surgeons, surgical residents and fellows    
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Evaluation, Implementation    

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University of Washington School of Nursing
Understanding School Nursing Work: Development of an e-tracking tool

A major challenge in articulating the value of school nurses is the lack of efficient processes to document their work. The development of an easy-to-use and relevant tool that allows tracking of school nursing activities would help nurses, supervisors, advocates, policy makers, and researchers advance school nurses.

The problem: The pandemic has illuminated the essential role of school nurses in keeping our youth healthy and safe. However, a significant and long-standing barrier in school nursing practice, advocacy, and research has been the lack of a user-friendly process to document what school nurses do. While we are aware, either through personal experience, observation or anecdotal reports, of the importance of school nurses, limited data on the specifics of what nurses do (i.e., how long they spend on nursing activities) exists. This information is vital to better understand how to support school nurses.

Lack of standardized documentation systems, and limited resources has resulted in variability on how school nurses log what happens in the health room. Many nurses are still using paper and pencil to log their activities and then at the end of the day, enter the information into the school information system. Because school nurses are stretched thin, what this means in real—life practice is that nurses often only record the critical activities. These logs are then used to make staffing decisions on which schools have access to a school nurse. In reality, nurses are doing much more than what is being tracked, which has unintended consequences: perceptions that school nurses only give medications, data that do not accurately reflect the breadth and depth of their work impacting the allocation of resources to school health services, and inability to further school nursing research in examining the associations between school nursing activities and health outcomes. This lack of information on school nursing directly impacts school nurse staffing thereby reducing school nurse numbers, because of school administrators and other education professionals are unaware of what a school nurse truly does. With fewer (and busier) school nurses, students, families, and staff suffer the consequences of having less health support in schools.

The need: Dr. Willgerodt (UW School of Nursing) and Dr. Smith (Director of Health Services, Greater Albany Pubic Schools) are hoping to create an electronic app or tracking system that takes into account the limited time of school nurses while allowing documentation of school nursing activities. We will connect students to practicing school nurses to concretely understand the needs of these end-users as well as school administrators and policy researchers to get a sense of what documentation and data are needed. 

Target users
University of Washington school nurses. Ultimately will impact the health of all youth in schools    
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping

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Reddit
Synchronous Engagement

What might synchronous interaction look like on Reddit? How might we protect the wellbeing of both Redditors' and Mods' in such an environment?

The online social behavior of the world is moving towards a desire for real time engagement, community belonging, and authentic connection. Apps such as Discord, Telegram, and Slack enable users to live in an online community that feels alive, constantly connected, and emulates social club behavior. While Reddit is successful at community building, our existing structure is not conducive to enabling a real time engagement platform. 

Building Real Time Community capabilities is vital to Reddit attracting and retaining Daily Active Users (DAU). How might Reddit position itself as the home for the world’s best real time communities; where users can discover, consume content, and engage all on our platform? 

Keep in mind: synchronous features require a large amount of moderation time and effort to ensure a safe and valuable environment. Moderators are key to Reddit communities and are often overworked and underserved. How might our solution reduce Mod’s work load and protect all Redditors' wellbeing? 

Website
https://www.reddit.com/
Target users
Redditors (14-24), Mods    
User-centered design components
User Research, Design Research, Ideation, Prototyping, Evaluation

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