Whether it’s an image, a diagram, or just plain text, there is a real challenge with displaying large amounts of information on the Web. Safeco Insurance Company was interested in displaying very large data flow diagrams on the Web. They wanted users to be able to easily view, navigate, and print these diagrams. Safeco needed to have the ability to support this approach from both a maintenance and a technology perspective. After exhaustive study, we proposed an application that uses Visio along with HTML and JavaScript to implement our solution. While Visio does possess some inherent limitations, we are confident that this presents a tenable solution to many of Safeco’s present problems.

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a relatively new technology that enables users to subscribe to news feeds and monitor news content from a central application. While this provides a convenient way for the user to consolidate and organize news, it can lead to an overabundance of information. Our research team developed an interface agent, a software system with semi-intelligent capabilities, to assist the user with the management of RSS news content. By observing and profiling a user’s news browsing behavior, the interface agent displays news articles that are most interesting to the user. Because the delegation of responsibility to an agent may compromise a user’s control, we designed with a focus on values such as user autonomy.

The Virtual Jaamati (Swahili for "communal meeting place") is a suite of exclusive information services for people who gather in places, like cafes, that serve as centers of local communities. These centers often offer activities such as live music and poetry readings. The activities are globally advertised but their participants form the basis of a community. Using open-source content management systems and instant messaging software, we provide services that include galleries, forums and personal communication. We intend to promote a sense of community by tying a physical location to a virtual one, thus increasing the “functionality” of the physical space.

Through the creation of a database that centralizes customer and order information, this project offers design solutions for improving the efficiency of the sales department of Beauty Ever Jewelry Co., Ltd (Thailand). Based on the results gathered through user-centered needs assessments, design studies, and task evaluation, this database aims for a degree of functionality that permits company associates to add, edit and search customer information. This system will support improved information organization and access.

Like a zoo is a gallery of animals, a botanical garden is a gallery of plants. But unlike a zoo, botanical gardens are arranged for aesthetics and plants are often unidentifiable to the visitors. A possible solution is to embed Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that respond to a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) integrated with an RFID reader to help visitors identify what they are looking at. RFID Tags would be placed at an exhibit within the botanical garden and the typical visitor could use the PDA-RFID reader to gather meaningful information on the species on display.

The Informatics Project Finder is a web-based information retrieval system and backend database that will provide Informatics students the ability to seek and locate potential external clients for course projects, internships, and independent research. Potential clients, businesses, and community members will be able to post projects online and students will be able to reference this resource to find appropriate opportunities.

OneStopVacation is an all-inclusive vacation planner designed to solve the commonly encountered problem of information mismanagement. With so many choices of storage places, users often cannot recall where exactly they saved their information. This program addresses these problems by saving the information users find online and organizing it all in one place to make it easy to retrieve and access. A desktop application that can be downloaded from a website, OneStopVacation is simple and easy to use and is targeted towards any individual possessing a computer with Windows XP or 2003 Operation System.

With today’s busy lifestyle, parents may find it difficult to keep abreast of their child’s progress at school and often lack information about their child’s grades, attendance, and homework. Existing methods of communication make it difficult for teachers to relay this information to parents. Koalafire is tailored to facilitate interaction between schoolteachers, students, and parents as well as manage the information itself. Koalafire can deliver the information to parents directly – eliminating students as “middlemen”. Koalafire also models ways to deliver information via multiple mediums, including the Internet, print, and telephone. By keeping parents aware of students’ progress and behavior in school, they can be more involved in their child’s education.

Informatics students find themselves involved in multiple group projects throughout each quarter. Although they often have trouble managing various aspects of these projects, students rarely turn to management software. Current project management software packages are inefficient, overly generalized, and not designed for an academic setting. These software packages are often hard to setup, frustrating to use, overly rich in features, or lacking functionality. Our goal was to design an easily customizable, modular student group project management system, built to meet the exclusive needs of Informatics students. The system will be easy to setup, easy to manage, and fully extensible, making it more appealing and useful for group-based projects.

Streamlining information management processes within an organization improves the efficiency of its operations, thereby allowing members to focus on accomplishing organizational goals. This project engaged in an extensive needs assessment of the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education (CIRGE) and developed and implemented systems to serve the organization’s information needs. The project addresses issues in information management such as self-sustainability of systems without staff member technical expertise, user-centric design of online content, and the centralization of information to facilitate more efficient operations.

In the last ten years, Intranets have become commonplace within the corporate environment. They allow employees within the company to be networked together in the sharing of information as well as streamlining processes and methods. Madison Park Greetings wanted to look into the design of an Intranet for their company. This project outlines the steps undertaken in completing the design process, the findings and a strategy for implementing an Intranet system.

The daily operation of an organization creates massive amounts of vital information. This project explores options for information reuse and repurposing at Washington Mutual, a major financial services company. Although Washington Mutual had considered methods of data collection, the aggregation and presentation of data had not yet been formalized. The limited available resources, ever changing needs of the company, and technical experience of the employees made a solution based on XML the most logical choice. We designed a tool that allowed those with limited technical backgrounds to create reports based on multiple XML data sources, as well as a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) editor for XSLT. Such a system would significantly reduce the amount of time spent reporting and would allow for the repurposing of the information.

Current trip planning systems frequently return results that are not optimal for users and are also unable to customize results based on users’ specified needs. This project demonstrates that using Dijkstra’s Algorithm to model mass transportation systems can consistently provide the optimal path to users as well as weigh multiple competing (zero-sum) factors, such as speed versus fare. This project also explores methods that can help mitigate the increased cost of computationally finding the best route, as opposed to only finding an adequate route.

Using Web-based technologies, the Visual Human Interface (VHI) constructs an interactive visual human model for patients to localize and describe symptoms. With VHI, patients can edit inputs and have a graphical representation made available to clinicians for assessment. The Web-based information system allows interactive visual manipulation for patients to locate and assess the pain areas in their bodies. This system will allow timely access for the clinicians, facilitate interactive data-inputs for the patients, and allow archiving and storing of pain assessment for the clinical staff.

The Patient-centered Health Record (Pc-HR) System allows patients to better organize their personal health information, be more informed about their health progress, and provide their physicians with crucial information. Pc-HR is an ongoing project by members of the UW Biomedical & Health Informatics Program and focuses on assessing the user needs, re-designing, and studying the usability of the Pc-HR user interface. It is important that a health record system is designed around patients to help them organize their personal health information in a much more efficient and intuitive way. The benefits of a patient-centered health record system can also improve doctor and patient communication, where patients are more aware of their health conditions, and doctors can be more informed of their patients’ overall health.