Emotionalism within People-Oriented Software Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces EG-SAT, a practical method combining theories from software engineering and decision making to systematically analyze and incorporate emotional goals into software design, improving user satisfaction.

Contribution

It presents the Emotional Goal Systematic Analysis Technique (EG-SAT), a novel, easy-to-use method for identifying and addressing emotional goals in software development.

Findings

EG-SAT effectively helps analyze emotional goals in software design.

Participants gained valuable insights into functional and non-functional goals.

EG-SAT outperformed a baseline technique in case study and experiment.

Abstract

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.