Abstract
Reducing the impacts from climate change requires people to make decisions that may prompt substantial changes in their lives. One possible way to help them is with personalized decision aids. Here we describe a method for evaluating such aids, in terms of how they affect users’ understanding of their situation, defined in terms of their (a) knowledge, (b) consistency of preferences, and (c) active mastery of the material. Our method provides a simple way to evaluate the usability of climate-change decision aids, and to address concerns that the choice of display could bias users’ attitudes. We demonstrate it with the Surging Seas Risk Finder, a decision aid focused on coastal flooding (http://sealevel.climatecentral.org/).
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a research grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making (SES-0949710). The authors thank Jack Wang and Dan Rizza for their support with the experiment.
Author attributions
All authors contributed to the conception and the design of the tests and the experiment used within the work presented. G.W.P. ran the experiment and analyzed the data. G.W.P. and B.F. led in the writing of the paper, with input from B.S.
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The authors declare no competing financial interests.
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Wong-Parodi, G., Fischhoff, B. & Strauss, B. A method to evaluate the usability of interactive climate change impact decision aids. Climatic Change 126, 485–493 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1226-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1226-9