Occupant behaviors have significant impacts on building operations and indoor environmental quality (IEQ), while occupants’ comfort and well-being are influenced by building operations as they are the main recipients of building services. Current building performance metrics mostly focus on physical building and systems, oversimplifying occupant features. To reinforce the importance of occupants and inform occupant-centric building design and operation, occupant-centric performance metrics are needed. This chapter, leveraging discussions on occupant needs in the previous chapters, proposes a suite of occupant-centric performance metrics to cover the main use cases in the building life cycle representing performance of resource use and environmental impact, IEQ, and human-building interaction. Calculations or measurements to quantify these metrics are described and corresponding visualization techniques are used to facilitate communications with architects, building designers and engineers, occupants, building operators, and policymakers. The chapter further discusses the basis of setting reasonable occupant-centric performance targets for these metrics and provides recommendations for stakeholder communication on building performance using these metrics.

In recent years, research has emerged to quantitatively and qualitatively understand occupants' interactions with buildings. However, there has been surprisingly little research on building interfaces and how their design, context (e.g., location), and underlying logic impact their usability and occupants’ perceived control, as well as the resulting comfort and energy performance. Research is needed to better understand how occupants interact with building interfaces in both commercial and residential applications; both applications are important to address as there are many differences in interface types, level of control and understanding, and even expectations of engagement. This paper provides a cursory review and discussion of select common building interfaces: windows, window shades/blinds, thermostats, and lighting controls. The goal of this paper is to review literature related to these human-building interfaces to explore interface characteristics, current design and use challenges, and relationships between building interfaces and occupants. Human-building interface interactions are complex, more research is needed to understand design, use, and characteristics. Common themes emerged throughout the literature review to explain occupant interactions (or lack of interactions) with building interfaces, which included thermal and visual comfort, ease and access of control, interface/control placement, poor interface/control design, lack of understanding, and social-behavioral dynamics.