Design of an Interactive Fitness Application Based on User’s Emotional Requirements

Abstract

Incorporating users’ emotions within software engineering has evolved throughout time. In recent years various research studies started taking into account users’ emotional needs and their integration into the requirements elicitation process. Addressing users’ emotions at the early stages of software development has the potential for long-term benefits for the system. In this thesis work, we build a practical, interactive fitness application based on users’ emotional requirements. We look at motivational models and their incorporation with emotional goals to form emotional goal models for our system. The emotional goal models are constructed from the Do/Be/Feel/Role data. We conduct a survey with 182 participants where we ask them to fill in answers for Do/Be/Feel/Role framework. We use the survey results to create emotional goal models for our system and make sure to address every emotional goal with a corresponding functional goal. The leaf-level of the emotional goal model hierarchy is then extracted into a set of user stories. We proceed with user stories to build a real world application using React JS framework. We evaluate the result of our practical application by asking users first to experience it and then fill in a System Usability Scale test. The resulting score we received from the SUS test was around 84.5, which is a positive score for software systems. It is concluded that incorporating users’ emotional requirements in the early stages of development positively impacts its user experience and usability.