Toward Emotion-Oriented Requirements Engineering: A Case Study of a Virtual Clinics Application

With the evolution of developing software systems serving a wide range of purposes, more requirements emerged to build competitive and widely accepted software. Taking into account intended users' emotions when using a system can reveal new requirements for that system, which can lead to a better user experience, hence, more acceptable and enhanced systems. In this paper, we investigate the potential for eliciting and modeling emotional requirements in developing software systems. Interviews and Think-aloud protocol were used to elicit emotional requirements, and Goal-oriented modeling was used to model emotional requirements in relation to other requirements. This paper illustrates the proposed approach through a case study on a virtual clinic feature in a healthcare application. The results of the case study indicate that failure to consider emotional requirements when designing an application for virtual clinics leads to issues that adversely affect user acceptance and continuity of use of the application.