Abstract. Many popular e-commerce sites provide decision support tools to assist potential customers. Preliminary research indicates that web usage mining analyses may help to assess the utility of these tools and highlight possible areas for improvement. This paper describes a new procedure for assessing the utility of web-based support tools using techniques in rough set theory. The authors evaluated this procedure in a study of two such support tools, one developed by the US-EPA and the other developed by one of the authors. Results provided interesting insights on the utility of both tools and indicated that both tools could be improved. Details of the new procedure, results obtained from its evaluation, and its implications for future work are described. 1

This paper explores refinements to methods used in a procedure being developed by the authors to personalize user interfaces for online shopping support tools. In the authors ’ original procedure, classical methods in rough set theory are used in conjunction with traditional algorithms in web usage mining. This paper will explore an alternative approach, specifically the dominance-based rough set approach (DRSA), for use with the authors ’ original procedure. DRSA has its foundations in the classical rough set approach (CRSA). However unlike CRSA, DRSA considers feature/preference-ordered data. In web usage mining analyses, where elicitation of user preferences is a common task, feature/preference order is an important factor and may provide insights that classical/traditional approaches may omit. The authors discuss how DRSA may benefit and improve their original procedure and discuss how the information gained from DRSA analyses could be used to further build their original procedure by enabling item ordering and feature highlighting. This paper will describe the research process, outcomes, and outline opportunities for future work. 1

Market analysis indicates that consumers are increasingly becoming more aware of the impacts of the current choices and are showing interest in understanding how to choose more healthy, ethical, and environmentally friendly items. Given the abundance of information available for this task, it has increasingly become more difficult for consumers to decipher quality among the quantity. Design and development of highly usable support tools that enable consumers to compare product selections in relation to their own individual values could greatly assist consumers in this task. There exist several usability metrics that could be utilized to determine the usability of such tools. By utilizing these metrics, system designers could obtain the necessary information to design and develop more usable support tools of this kind, thus providing consumers with the most satisfying shopping experience possible. This paper will provide an overview of work being done towards this goal. Specifically, the authors will discuss common issues relevant to the domain of environmental preferable purchasing. The authors will also discuss several metrics that could be used to determine the usability of such tools, with specific emphasis on decision accuracy. The authors hypothesize that support tools that enable consumers to obtain higher decision accuracies could provide consumers with a more satisfying shopping experience and possibly increase the selection of eco-friendly alternatives. A discussion outlining future work is also provided. 1.