Emotional Attachment Framework for People-Oriented Software

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Emotional Attachment Framework, a novel approach to understanding emotional goals in social-oriented software, demonstrated through a case study on helping homeless people and validated by multiple evaluations.

Contribution

It presents a new framework based on emotional attachment theories to better capture emotional goals in software design, especially for social interaction platforms.

Findings

Framework provides deeper insights into emotional goals.

Evaluations show improved understanding of emotional engagement.

Potential to enhance user-centered design in social software.

Abstract

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.