| This dissertation describes a framework that has been developed to specify, design, implement, and evaluate user-centered environmental software tools. The addition of visualization techniques to perform data analysis was explored in this framework. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) was used as a case study to illustrate the framework, which has several elements: (1) A method was developed to study a problem domain, which yielded the user tasks, the data models, and the visualization needs for that domain. (2) The user interface and the visualizations added to the environmental software are designed using a method that starts by using the task models and the data models produced by the domain analysis. (3) Finally, a method to evaluate the environmental software performance was developed. The system evaluation includes the time used to perform the task and the solution quality. The effect of adding more software components to the software system was explored based on the parameters of time and quality. It was found that the information visualization component improved the data analysis performance. Quality of results and time to perform the task were good indicators of how information visualization helped to improve the environmental system performance. However, the component added to help users in the problem formulation had no effect on the performance. Many suggestions to improve the software component during problem formulation were derived from the analysis of data produced in the experiment. |
