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(27-01) What do users of life-cycle decision support tools really want and do? Hofstetter, Patrick*,1,2, Bare, Jane3, Lippiatt, Barbara4, 1 ORISE Research Fellow at U.S. EPA, Cincinnati, OH2 Visiting Scientist at Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA3 U.S. EPA, Cincinnati, OH4 National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaitherburg, MD ABSTRACT- A large number of decision support tools that follow ideas of life-cycle assessment or management have been developed in the past. Further, considerable research efforts have been made to improve methods to assess and weight environmental impacts and to provide relevant information for the decision makers. However, almost no information is available on what type of information users of these tools really want and use. To fill this gap we approached the user community of BEES (Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability) with an internet based survey. 569 partially or fully completed questionnaires could finally be used to evaluate: which degrees of transparency, complexity, and uncertainty analysis users want; what type of result presentation they would prefer; whether they used the weighting options, which one they used and if not, why; how they determined their own weighting factors and whether they are influenced by temporal and spatial considerations; and how environmental and economic information should be combined. The results of this analysis will be presented and supplemented by statistical tests on how preferences depend on type of employer, motivations of using BEES and experience in doing so. Although the survey was geared towards one specific tool (BEES), many results apply as well to other tools used in the U.S.A. Therefore, we will make suggestions that tool developers and researchers may want to consider when they make choices and assumptions about the interface between tool and users. Key words: survey, software user preferences, user stratification |
