Visualizing sustainability performance indicators of IT products effectively and correctly in a single display : A user study on visualizations of benchmarking data

Abstract: Communication around climate change is a challenging area. It is beneficial for companies to present themselves as more environmentally sustainable than they are, leading to greenwashing. Type 1 ecolabels, as described in the ISO standard 14024, try to mitigate this problem by providing independent verification of a company’s claims. TCO Certified is a type 1 environmental label, so ensuring that the organization behind TCO Certified, TCO Development, does not contribute to greenwashing is critical. TCO Certified has created a tool called the “benchmarking functionalities”. Using this tool, brand owners in the IT industry can compare their certified products using Sustainability Performance Indicators (SPIs) defined by TCO Development. Misinterpretations by brand owners using the “benchmarking functionalities” must be minimized to ensure the tool does not contribute to greenwashing. The design activity framework has been used for this study to create an alternative version of the benchmarking functionalities. The focus of the design process was to create a visualization that maximizes user comprehension to ensure the data cannot be misinterpreted and misused for greenwashing without compromising on usability. The alternative version was compared to the original version of the benchmarking functionalities in a user study. The results indicate that the original version of the benchmarking functionalities has a better System Usability Scale (SUS) score, and users could solve tasks quicker than with the alternative version. However, the users performed the tasks better with the alternative version. The difference between the correctness of the answers and the user’s confidence that their answer to a task was correct was larger for all tasks for the original version, indicating that there might be a false sense of comprehension in the original version of the benchmarking functionalities. To further understand the results, understanding how learning has impacted the study’s outcome is needed. Another relevant direction to study further is how stakeholders from different cultures, in terms of company and country, interpret and use visualizations for sustainability data.