Designing an Evaluation Tool to Measure Emotional Goals

Human emotions have been widely researched in many disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and medicine. Their importance cannot be underestimated. Unfortunately, so far in software engineering, requirements engineers focus mostly on gathering functional and quality requirements and rarely consider how stakeholders feel or would like to feel when using a software product. Incorporating the user's emotional goals in software engineering can be very challenging considering that emotions are very complex and subjective. Moreover, when it comes to incorporating user emotions in software engineering, existing methodologies or frameworks provide very little guidance to software professionals. In this paper, the authors present work on evaluating emotional goals in a software engineering context. The authors describe the development of a questionnaire as an evaluation tool and evaluate the questionnaire in the context of a digital photo frame placed in the homes of nine older persons living on their own. Further improvements to the tool are proposed based on the findings from the study.