Development of a framework for evaluating the contents and usability of the building life cycle assessment tool

Over the past decades, various tools that can perform building life cycle assessment (LCA) as well as life cycle cost (LCC) or CO2 analysis, have been developed. Even though these developed tools should be effectively evaluated and improved to encourage the continuous use of such tools, no research has been conducted on this matter. In this regard, this study sought to propose a framework for evaluating a building LCA tool from both the developer's and user's perspectives. In the developer evaluation process, experts evaluate if the design and implementation status (i.e., content status) are appropriate, and determine the design and implementation problems (i.e., content problems) based on six evaluation criteria, through content evaluation. In the user evaluation process, the users and evaluators determine the usability problems based on six usability attributes, through usability evaluation. The developer and user evaluation results are then interpreted through Satisfaction-Importance (S–I) analysis and Severity-Priority (S–P) analysis to prioritize the area of improvement and to determine the improvement strategy. To verify the proposed framework, a case study was conducted on an actual building LCA tool. The evaluation results showed that the problems corresponding to the assessment method and result should be preferentially improved in terms of content, while those corresponding to learnability, efficiency, and errors should be preferentially improved in terms of usability. Therefore, it is expected that the utilization of the proposed framework can effectively evaluate and improve various conventional building LCA tools in a reasonable way.