Measuring Usability in Decision Tools Supporting Collaborations for Environmental Disaster Response

Disaster prediction, community preparedness, infrastructure resilience, and costs are a subset of the reasons environmental disaster response and risk assessment collaboration tools are vital for preserving the future. Even using decision support and intelligent data, tools are often inhibited by specialized and even proprietary goals in the sense that overall efficient collaborations are not yet possible - or the positive impacts are lessened across all resilience applications. Before proceeding with new developments, an analysis of existing applications was necessary for tools having a certain evaluation criteria cross-section of decision support, collaboration potential, and usability factors for users of all knowledge levels. To our best knowledge, a usability study of such tools is currently missing. Thus, this paper presents an analysis of existing risk assessment and disaster response tools to enable user communities to select the appropriate tools for their respective environmental response goals.

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