In the field of design, it is accepted that users' perceptions of systems are influenced by emotion as much as cognition, and functionally-complete products will not be adopted if they do not appeal to emotions. While software engineering methodologies have matured to handle non-functional requirements such as usability, what has not been investigated fully is the emotional needs of people. That is, what do users want to feel, and how do they feel about a system? In this paper, we argue that these emotional desires should be treated as first-class citizens in software engineering methodology, and present preliminary work on including emotions in requirements models using emotional goals. We evaluate these models both with a controlled user study, and on a case study of emergency systems for older people. The results of the controlled user study indicate that people are comfortable interpreting and modifying our models, and view the inclusion of emotions as first-class entities as a positive step in software engineering. The results of our case study indicate that current emergency systems fail to address the emotional needs their users, leading to low adoption and low usage. We conceptualised, designed, and prototyped an improved emergency system, and placed it into the homes of nine older people over a period of approximately two weeks each, showing improved user satisfaction over existing systems. 1. By "design" here, we refer to the design of the product, not of the software architecture or detailed designs.
This qualitative investigation makes suggestions about creating age-friendly cities for older adults focusing on three domains of the World Health Organization (WHO) age-friendly city framework namely “Communication and Information”, “Outdoor Spaces and Buildings” and “Social Participation”. The authors present two case studies, the first one focusing on older adults using activity wearables for health self-management in the neighborhood, and the second one focusing on older adults engaged in social prescribing activities in the community. The authors then reflect on the relationships of the domains and future opportunities for age-friendly cities. These case studies apply a co-design and citizen-based approach focusing within these larger frameworks on emotions, values and motivational goals of older adults. Results suggest how the convergence of the often siloed age-friendly city components based on older adults’ goals and input can lead to better social participation and longer-term health outcomes. The authors propose that the digital, physical and social aspects need to be considered in all domains of age-friendly cities to achieve benefits for older adults. Further work involving older adults in the future shaping of age-friendly neighborhoods and cities, and identifying barriers and opportunities is required.
It is common practice in software engineering to develop a product for the "user". The concepts of users and actors typically oversimplify the variety of people that could use a system in a given scenario. By developing the system for actors, many software engineers effectively develop the system for themselves, embodying the abstract actors with their own personalities -i.e. how would I use the system if I was this actor? A single perspective may be sufficient for situations with a well-defined workflow, however, many systems in the social and domestic domains should consider people's emotional response to systems, which impact product acceptance. To ensure that emotional desires are met and that a product appeals to the intended audience, we advocate the use of personas within emotional scenarios. Personas and scenarios can be used to explore the diversity of people's background, emotions and motivations, and how they would react emotionally to design decisions. We describe our experience using personas and emotional scenarios in three projects related to people's health, where emotions are ever present, in the domains of aged wellbeing and mental health.
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