Emotion-led modelling for people-oriented requirements engineering: The case study of emergency systems

Abstract

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.

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“…We encourage stakeholders to discuss and modify models during group meetings help to engage them in the requirements process. In other work, we have successfully employed agent-oriented models in this context with psychologists, general practitioners, sleep experts, nurses, ethnographers, and interaction designers [20], [25], [28], [31], [33]. This is facilitated by the fact that our approach relies on lightweight, hierarchical models.…”

One size doesn't fit all: diversifying "the user" using personas and emotional scenarios

“…Sutcliffe and Sawyer [19] explore how motivations, values and emotions can hinder the achievement of the system goals. In recent work, Miller et al [12] use agent-oriented modelling to explicitly integrate people's emotional goals into requirements engineering, treating emotional goals as first-class citizens in the requirements engineering process.…”

“…We trialled our new design -a picture frame mobile app to support the communication between older people and loved ones -in the home of nine older people over a period of two weeks, and our results showed an improved user experience for those older people who already had an emergency alarm. Further details of this study can be found in Miller et al [12].…”

“…However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that other factors, such as people's emotions, have a deep impact upon the adoption of systems by their intended users. We consider an emotion to be a feeling that characterises a state of mind, such feeling joy, terror, or safety [12]. Emotional factors are elusive to identify and to be integrated with the design of the system.…”

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