Designing Envirnomental Decision: Rethinking LCA Software through User-Cented and Data-Driven Design

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is widely recognised as a robust methodology for evaluating the environmental impacts of products and processes. However, despite its central role in sustainability-oriented decision-making, the software currently used to perform LCA calculations remains largely inaccessible outside expert communities. Widely adopted LCA platforms continue to present significant barriers for interdisciplinary stakeholders who are increasingly required to engage with environmental data in industrial and organisational contexts. Part of this limitation stems from the historically limited application of User Experience (UX) research methods within this highly technical field of interaction design. As a result, commonly used LCA software platforms do not prioritise usability, relying instead on static outputs, rigid visualisations, highly technical terminology, and limited flexibility of use. These constraints frequently force users to rely on external tools to manipulate data, explore scenarios, or adapt results for communication and decision-making purposes. This work addresses the gap between methodological rigour and practical usability in LCA tools by investigating how user-centred design approaches can enhance the interpretability, adaptability, and adoption of LCA results. The objective of the study is to design and validate an interactive, role-sensitive LCA dashboard capable of supporting both expert analytical work and non-expert decision-making, while integrating real-time data and AI-assisted functionalities within an industrial context. The research was conducted within a regional, publicly funded initiative focused on sustainable industrial transition and followed a Human-Centered Design methodology grounded in widely adopted UX research methods, actively involving software users throughout the research and design process. The study combined a systematic literature review, benchmarking of established LCA platforms, a quantitative survey with LCA practitioners, and semi-structured interviews with domain experts. Insights from these methods informed the development of personas, information architecture, UX copy strategies, and iterative wireframing and prototyping. The resulting dashboard prototype was evaluated through expert walkthroughs and usability feedback sessions, including a case study focused on real-time monitoring of an industrial reactor. The results highlight several critical issues related to current LCA calculation software and platforms. First, expert users consistently depend on external tools such as Excel to manipulate and reinterpret LCA outputs, revealing a structural lack of flexibility in existing systems. Second, both expert and non-expert stakeholders experience significant cognitive barriers due to rigid visualisations, opaque relationships between inventory data and impact results, and inaccessible technical language. Third, real-time and time-based representations of environmental performance are perceived as highly valuable, yet remain largely absent from mainstream LCA platforms. In response to these limitations, the proposed dashboard introduces a set of functionalities that are uncommon in traditional LCA software. These include the ability to manipulate data both numerically and graphically directly within the platform, without relying on external tools, supporting dynamic scenario exploration and rapid what-if analyses. The system also integrates a notification and operational alert framework designed to guide users in ways aligned with distinct personas identified through UX research: LCA experts focused on methodological rigour and detailed data analysis; engineers responsible for operational decision-making in industrial contexts; and designers or project managers who need to understand and communicate LCA results without deep technical expertise across interdisciplinary teams. This work demonstrates that usability is not a secondary concern in LCA software, but a determining factor in whether environmental data can meaningfully inform design and operational decisions. More broadly, it shows that engaging with the ecosystem of diverse user roles through UX research is essential in complex environments where multiple stakeholders must interpret, negotiate, and act upon sustainability data. By reframing LCA tools not merely as calculation systems but as socio-technical decision infrastructures, this research highlights how the effectiveness of environmental assessment depends on the ways data is interpreted, manipulated, and communicated across roles, thereby expanding the potential adoption and practical impact of LCA in industrial and organisational settings.