Personalizing User Interfaces for Environmental Decision Support Systems

The quality of the natural environment has become one of the primary concerns in present society. In Canada, we have been asked to take on the “One Tonne Challenge” to reduce personal household emissions by 1 tonne. However, very little has been done to illuminate the various connections between our household purchases and the effect they can have on the quality of our health and environment. Several decision support systems are available to assist consumers compare alternatives. However, these systems do little to enhance the consumer’s experience. Correct clustering of consumers in terms of their product attribute preferences would enable the construction of personalized user interfaces thus increase consumer satisfaction when interacting with the system and increase the chance of inspiring greener purchasing habits. This paper analyzes a clustering technique that uses methods from multivariate statistics, rough set theory, and machine learning to cluster users in a webbased environmental decision support system and test the success of the clustering. Results from our analysis are discussed.