Emotionalism within People-Oriented Software Design

In designing most software applications, much effort is placed upon the functional goals, which make a software system useful. However, the failure to consider emotional goals, which make a software system pleasurable to use, can result in disappointment and system rejection even if utilitarian goals are well implemented. Although several studies have emphasized the importance of people's emotional goals in developing software, there is little advice on how to address these goals in the software system development process. This paper proposes a theoretically-sound and practical method by combining the theories and techniques of software engineering, requirements engineering, and decision making. The outcome of this study is the Emotional Goal Systematic Analysis Technique (EG-SAT), which facilitates the process of finding software system capabilities to address emotional goals in software design. EG-SAT is easy to learn and easy to use technique that helps analysts to gain insights into how to address people's emotional goals. To demonstrate the method in use, a two-part evaluation is conducted. First, EG-SAT is used to analyze the emotional goals of potential users of a mobile learning application that provides information about low carbon living for tradespeople and professionals in the building industry in Australia. The results of using EG-SAT in this case study are compared with a professionally-developed baseline. Second, we ran a semi-controlled experiment in which 12 participants were asked to apply EG-SAT and another technique on part of our case study. The outcomes show that EG-SAT helped participants to both analyse emotional goals and gain valuable insights about the functional and non-functional goals for addressing people's emotional goals

Emotional Attachment Framework for People-Oriented Software

In organizational and commercial settings, people often have clear roles and workflows against which functional and non-functional requirements can be extracted. However, in more social settings, such as platforms for enhancing social interaction, successful applications are driven more by using emotional engagement than functionality, and the drivers of user engagement are difficult to identify. A key challenge is to understand people's emotional goals so that they can be incorporated into the design. This paper proposes a novel framework called the Emotional Attachment Framework, which is based on existing models and theories of emotional attachment. Its aim is to facilitate the process of getting a deeper insight into emotional goals in software engineering. To demonstrate the framework in use, emotional goals are elicited for a software application that aims to provide help for homeless people. To measure the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed technique in this study, a series of evaluations are undertaken: a semi-controlled experiment, a comparison analysis, and domain expert and end-user evaluation. The results indicate that the Emotional Attachment Framework has the potential to give better insight during analysis of emotional goals.Comment: 44 page