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

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.