Each and every day, students at the University of Washington will misplace some type of item that is valuable or important for their academic pursuits; whether it be a laptop, an AirPod, a water bottle, ID card, or key. A majority of these lost items are ultimately returned by the university's lost-and-found services. Unfortunately, there is little guidance available for students looking for their missing property. The university has a number of lost-and-found service locations throughout its campuses and properties.

Maya is a University of Washington (UW) Student that generally has many things that are very important to her like her Husky Card, Laptop and AirPods. Most of the time when Maya loses something, she has no idea what office or building to go to in order to find out where to turn in the item she lost.

David works on the Front Desk for his job and he receives lost items from students almost daily. David's work would be much easier if there was a central place to put all of the lost items and if it was easy for him to connect those items with their rightful owner.

To better understand the problem, we interviewed five UW students about their experiences with lost items on campus.

Several participants expressed frustration with the current system:

"I lost my Husky Card in Kane Hall and went to three different front desks. Nobody knew anything."

"I didn't even know UW had a lost and found."

"If there was one place to check, I would actually use it."

Participants reported that they often:

• Search multiple buildings

• Post in Discord servers or group chats

• Use Reddit or Facebook groups

• Give up after a few days

• Replace items instead of continuing their search

our testing demonstrated that while finding Lost Items is largely dependent upon the Search Functionality of the application  recovering lost items is ultimately dependent upon Trust Communication  and Privacy. As a result of participant-feedback -- we modified the Recovery Workflow  Added a Messaging Feature  Created Clearer Confirmation Screens  and Strengthened the AI Privacy Scanning Process. these modifications enabled us to create HuskyFind to be more Intuitive  Trusted  and User-Centered.

HuskyFind is an online lost-and-found (digital) solution created specifically for the university of washington community. HuskyFind allows users — including students, faculty and staff — to quickly locate their missing property using a single web-based platform. Searching, posting and communicating about lost or found items are all brought together in one easy-to-use system.

Users interact with HuskyFind via two primary pathways. Users can either search for missing items or they can post information regarding found items. Both options allow users to categorize search or posted items by type (category), and/or location, as well as access detailed information about each listed item and communicate directly with the owner of the found item (via messaging).

The key features of HuskyFind have been developed from data collected during user research and usability testing. Key features include search filtering; posting an item; uploading photos; tagging buildings where an item was located; messaging capabilities; privacy scanning utilizing artificial intelligence technology; and updating the status of an item.

HuskyFind reduces confusion, saves time, and increases the likelihood that lost property will be returned to its rightful owner by creating a single source where members of the University of Washington community can search for lost items, post their own lost or found items, and potentially recover lost items. By reducing confusion and saving time, HuskyFind also makes it easier to locate missing property.

The primary takeaway from this project is that good design is developed by understanding who will be using it (the end-user), rather than just focusing on developing solutions. This can be done through both user research and user testing; ultimately resulting in better products that are able to meet the needs of users.

For example, our research and testing revealed that users were concerned about their privacy when entering information into a lost item search engine, they wanted clear instructions to help them recover their lost item, and they preferred direct communication with others who may have found their lost item.

We faced one major challenge during the development of our prototype; narrowing down what feature set we should include. As designers, we generate numerous creative ideas at times; however, we need to identify those that will provide the greatest amount of utility to users in terms of functionally while minimizing complexity.