Title: Emotionalism within People-Oriented Software Design,
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.