A Systematic Literature Review on the Operationalization of Usability in Urban Pluvial Flooding Climate Services and the Influence of Contextual Factors

Abstract

Extreme weather impacts due to climate change, such as urban pluvial flooding, necessitate adaptive measures. To support decision making in climate adaptation, climate services provide information and guidance to policy makers and other stakeholders. Effective use of climate services is prohibited by usability gaps. Some causes for these gaps originate from contextual factors. However, these factors are not well understood within academic literature. Therefore, our systematic review has two research questions: (1) What dimensions of climate service usability are considered in the design and evaluation of their use and how are these operationalized?; and (2) What contextual influences may affect these identified dimensions? To this end, we analyzed 51 articles that cover one or more urban pluvial flooding climate services. Our results show several overarching categories of usability dimensions (functionality, ease of use, reducing time and effort, reliability, matching user needs, and other). However, these dimensions are not always fully operationalized by authors. Furthermore, our results show that most contextual factors originate from the meso level (within or between organizations), and in lesser extent the macro (e.g., national policies) and micro level (individual users). Here especially organizational (e.g., Does the climate service fit organizational work approaches?); and process factors (e.g., Was the climate service co‐produced?) have been shown to affect usability. We conclude that more attention should be given to usability as a concept within the design and evaluation of climate services well as to the influence of contextual influences.