Kokomo: an empirically evaluated methodology for affective applications

The introduction of affect or emotion modeling into software opens up new possibilities for improving user experience. Yet, current techniques for building affective applications are limited, with the treatment of affect in essence handcrafted in each application. The multiagent middleware Koko attempts to reduce the burden of incorporating affect modeling into applications. However, Koko can be effective only if the models it needs to function are suitably constructed. We propose Kokomo, a methodology that employs expressive communicative acts as an organizing principle for affective applications. Kokomo specifies the steps needed to create an affective application in Koko. A key motivation is that Kokomo would facilitate the construction of an affective application by engineers who may lack a prior background in affective modeling. We empirically evaluate Kokomo’s utility through a developer study. The results are positive and demonstrate that the developers who used Kokomo were able to develop an affective application in less time, with fewer lines of code, and with a reduced perception of difficulty than developers who worked without Kokomo.