Discovery of Usability Patterns in Support of Green Purchasing

Abstract

Market analysis indicates that consumers are increasingly becoming more aware of the impacts of the current choices and are showing interest in understanding how to choose more healthy, ethical, and environmentally friendly items. Given the abundance of information available for this task, it has increasingly become more difficult for consumers to decipher quality among the quantity. Design and development of highly usable support tools that enable consumers to compare product selections in relation to their own individual values could greatly assist consumers in this task. There exist several usability metrics that could be utilized to determine the usability of such tools. By utilizing these metrics, system designers could obtain the necessary information to design and develop more usable support tools of this kind, thus providing consumers with the most satisfying shopping experience possible. This paper will provide an overview of work being done towards this goal. Specifically, the authors will discuss common issues relevant to the domain of environmental preferable purchasing. The authors will also discuss several metrics that could be used to determine the usability of such tools, with specific emphasis on decision accuracy. The authors hypothesize that support tools that enable consumers to obtain higher decision accuracies could provide consumers with a more satisfying shopping experience and possibly increase the selection of eco-friendly alternatives. A discussion outlining future work is also provided. 1