Towards Integration of Sustainable User Experience Aspects in Systems

Design: A Human-Centered Framework

Urooj Fatima

and Katrien De Moor

Department of Information Security and Communication Technology,

Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU),

NO-7491, Trondheim, Norway

Keywords:

Software Systems Design, Human-Centered Design, User Experience, Sustainability, Human Needs.

Abstract:

The usage of software systems has immense impacts on human psychological well-being (a primary user ex-

perience outcome). The World Health Organization refers to well-being as “a positive state”, encompassing

e.g., a good quality of life. Studies have shown that the human well-being is dependent on the satisfaction

of certain psychological needs. However, normally, the software system development processes capture re-

quirements that are needed to fulﬁll the purpose of the system itself and not the psychological requirements of

humans who use and interact with these systems on an everyday basis. In order to address this challenge, this

paper contributes a framework: Sustainable User eXperiences Enabled Human-centered (SUXEH) framework

that addresses human psychological needs explicitly as one of the main modelling efforts in the early stages

of the development process. The framework does so in a way that eases the integration of sustainable user

experience aspects (mediated by the human needs) in the systems design phase of the overall development

process. The framework is illustrated using a case study, the Taxi System.

1 INTRODUCTION

Conventionally, software engineering design methods

include guidelines and/or rules on how to specify a

system from the perspective of its functionality, that

is, what and how the system performs its functions.

The ﬁrst objective is always to make the system work

according to the speciﬁed requirements. The require-

ments that are mapped to the design phase are typi-

cally functional requirements. The non-functional re-

quirements or the software quality requirements are

mostly taken care of during the ﬁnal product eval-

uation, referred as the product-oriented approach in

(Mylopoulos et al., 1992). Whether functional or non-

functional, these requirements are normally system-

centered and not human-centered.

In contrast, recent studies from the more human-

centered perspective (see e.g., (Monge Roffarello and

De Russis, 2019; Granow et al., 2018; Orben and

Przybylski, 2019)) have shown that the everyday tech-

nology we use has nuanced impacts on our psycho-

logical well-being. However, the psychological needs

of the people, who use these socio-technical systems

https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7635-1601

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8752-3351

and interact with them, have not been normally taken

into account during the main software system devel-

opment activities. On the one hand, and partly due

to the demand of short time-to-market and preva-

lent fuzziness in understanding human-psychological

needs, the focus in software systems engineering and

the user satisfaction of a system has remained always

connected to the fulﬁlment of the system-centered re-

quirements (Brown, 1997; Rosenbaum et al., 1999).

On the other hand, software developers lack guide-

lines on how to cater and analyse human psycholog-

ical needs during the development process. In this

paper, we argue that the identiﬁcation of human psy-

chological needs at an early stage of software devel-

opment can play an important role in making design

decisions. Inclusion of these needs at later stages

speciﬁcally once the system has been developed may

be difﬁcult, insufﬁcient and expensive. In this work,

we address these problems by answering the follow-

ing research questions:

1. What human psychological needs may be taken

care of while acquiring the requirements?

2. How can the requirements acquired in (1) be rep-

resented in requirements speciﬁcations?

Fatima, U. and De Moor, K.

Towards Integration of Sustainable User Experience Aspects in Systems Design: A Human-Centered Framework.

DOI: 10.5220/0012091800003538

In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2023), pages 129-140

ISBN: 978-989-758-665-1; ISSN: 2184-2833

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

129

3. In what way can these human-centered require-

ments speciﬁcations provide valuable input to the

design phase of the system development?

In late 2010s, it has been proposed in the Human-

Computer Interaction (HCI) and User Experience do-

main that certain human psychological needs are me-

diators of long-term sustainable user experience out-

comes like that of human well-being, engagement,

and motivation (Peters et al., 2018). The term “user

experience” is deﬁned as “user’s perceptions and re-

sponses that result from the use and/or anticipated

use of a system, product or service” (ISO 9241-

11:2018(en), 2018). In order to improve user expe-

rience and well-being, the authors in (Peters et al.,

2018) emphasize on supporting certain psychological

needs via technology designs using a model named

METUX (Motivation, Engagement and Thriving in

User Experience). Inspired by the METUX model,

we propose a framework that addresses the above for-

mulated research questions for inclusion of human

psychological requirements essential to human well-

being (and other long-term sustainable user experi-

ence outcomes) in the early stages of the software de-

velopment process.

Whether it is in the HCI or software engineer-

ing domain, normally, the user-centered requirements

are limited to the details of the direct interaction of

the user with the system, rarely taking into account

how they contribute to the overall sustainable human

well-being (see Section 2 for details). One of the dis-

tinct properties of the METUX model is that it allows

to analyse not only the direct impact of technology

use on momentary human psychological experience,

i.e., hedonic experiences (e.g., pleasure and comfort),

but also the broader long term impact on other as-

pects of human life, i.e., eudaimonic experiences (or

true ﬂourishing) that are strongly linked to the con-

cept of well-being (Hammer et al., 2018). Based on

the METUX model, our framework proposes guide-

lines on how certain designs can be avoided that may

satisfy human psychological needs on the interaction

level but frustrates the human psychological needs of

overall sustainable well-being by explicitly address-

ing eudaimonic experiences (more to come later in

Section 3.2).

In terms of software engineering goals, our pro-

posed framework assists software engineers from the

requirements acquisition phase to the early design

phase. During the requirements acquisition phase, the

framework helps in identiﬁcation of the basic human

needs that are required to be satisﬁed for better user

experience. Our framework provides the constructs

to represent these requirements as the goals of a sys-

tem, that is, in a form acceptable by the requirements

speciﬁcation phase or early design phase. For this,

the framework uses the goals-oriented requirements

language (GRL) that offers a graphical means of de-

scribing and structuring various types of concepts that

appear during the requirement process. The GRL, like

other goal modelling languages, is a valuable tool for

discussions with stakeholders. It provides the con-

structs needed for our primary concerns of (1) rea-

soning of human-centered requirements (2) modelling

human needs that are fuzzy in nature (3) describing

impact (positive or negative) of system functionali-

ties (satisfying speciﬁc needs) on overall human well-

being.

Figure 1 serves to illustrate the overview of

our proposed Sustainable User eXperiences Enabled

Human-centered (SUXEH) framework. It consists of

the functional requirements model of a system to be

designed (the functionality goals component), human

psychological needs (the enabling goals component),

and the goals that are needed to be satisﬁed for sus-

tainable outcomes of user experience (the user expe-

rience outcomes component). These components do

not exist in isolation. They belong to domains that tra-

ditionally do not negotiate or interact with each other.

The framework we propose identiﬁes the links be-

tween these components that represent different do-

mains, hence allowing these domains to interact and

exploit the links between them for better system mod-

elling in terms of improved and sustainable user ex-

periences. These components are different views of

the same system enabling us to design holistically for

better human well-being.

The main contribution of the framework is the pro-

vision of guidelines on:

• The identiﬁcation of basic human psychological

needs relevant to the system to be speciﬁed

• The representation of these needs in requirements

models

• How and to what extent the system can support

these basic needs through its functionality

• Avoidance of designs that can hinder these needs

by their negative inﬂuence on overall human well-

being.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Re-

lated work is discussed in Section 2. The details of

the SUXEH framework are provided in Section 3. In

Section 4, we describe how to use the framework by

applying the guidelines on a case study, the Taxi Sys-

tem. We discuss our research contributions in Section

5, and the conclusion and future work is presented in

Section 6.

ICSOFT 2023 - 18th International Conference on Software Technologies

130

Identiﬁcation

of Human

Needs

Functionality Goals

Enabling

Goals

User

Experience

Outcomes

Human-centered

Functionality

System-centered

Functionality

Identiﬁcation of

Functionalities

and their

Impact

Identiﬁcation

of UX

Outcomes

contributes to

Impacts

Design Phase

Requirements Phase

Figure 1: An Overview of the SUXEH Framework.

2 RELATED WORK

The human factors in software engineering have been

studied in the past and several approaches are pro-

posed (Checkland, 1981; Hix and Hartson, 1993;

Mayhew, 1999; Farooqui et al., 2019) that can be

embraced under the term “human-centered design

(HCD)” by ISO (ISO 9241-210:2019(en), 2019). One

of the ﬁrst approaches was soft system methodology

(SSM) (Checkland, 1981) that was applied also to

capture the impacts on people involved (e.g. stake-

holder, actors, and clients) and considered different

views of interactive systems during development. The

SSM, work done in (Acu

na et al., 2012), and earlier

HCD approaches overviewed in (Metzker and Reit-

erer, 2002) aim to merge HCI and user experience

methods and practises in software development pro-

cess in order to achieve usability goals in terms of user

satisfaction. This requires extra resources and exper-

tise along with other limitations listed in (Metzker and

Reiterer, 2002).

In the recent past, there has been increased focus

in exploring different human aspects (e.g., human di-

versity, human emotions, user involvement) and sup-

porting them during software development. One of

the recent works (Grundy et al., 2021), takes into ac-

count end-user human diversity in terms of software

user age, accessibility challenges, ethnicity, language

or gender in the digital health requirement models

for which they use Domain Speciﬁc Visual Language

(DSVL). The authors propose to incorporate these

human aspects in one of the main stream software

systems development methodologies, i.e., the Model-

Driven Software Engineering (MDSE). The work is

extended in (Grundy et al., 2022) where the authors

presented a preliminary taxonomy of some of the end-

user human diversity aspects for software developers

guidance by dividing human characteristics in groups.

In another work (Curumsing et al., 2019), the authors

propose a requirements engineering approach to take

into account emotional aspects of software usage in

smart home technology for the elderly. Their deﬁni-

tion of emotional goals refer to how users perceive

the end product and hence it is product speciﬁc. This

approach emphasize on linking emotional goals with

functional or quality goals. Another perspective of

addressing human aspects in software engineering in

the past is to consider user involvement during soft-

ware development life cycle to generate more usable

solutions (see e.g. (Iivari et al., 2010; Klemets and

Storholmen, 2020).

While relevant and bridging more towards the

user and human perspective, the approaches discussed

above do not explicitly consider and address the char-

acteristics of user experience. None of the approaches

provide design guidelines to support more than just

immediate hedonic experiences. Their investigation

mostly focus on the ease-of-use and usability of the

systems and hence lacks a more holistic or realis-

tic picture in terms of their broader impact on long-

term eudaimonic experiences that contribute to sus-

tainable human well-being. Further, the relation-

ship between user experience outcomes and human

psychological needs, as proposed in the METUX

model, has not been taken into account (Peters et al.,

2018). Moreover, the recent approaches proposed in

(Grundy et al., 2021) and (Curumsing et al., 2019)

are MDSE and product-speciﬁc respectively. Based

on the METUX model, the framework we propose

would allow design strategies to be identiﬁed that ad-

dress these research gaps.

Towards Integration of Sustainable User Experience Aspects in Systems Design: A Human-Centered Framework

131

3 THE FRAMEWORK

Figure 2 illustrates the SUXEH framework given in

Figure 1 with more emphasis on the types of re-

lationship between the functionality of the system

and the fundamental human psychological needs that

enable sustainable user experience outcomes. The

framework comprises three components distinguish-

ing human-centered needs, user experience outcomes

and the human-centered functionality. The decompo-

sition into components helps in reducing the complex-

ity of the modelling effort for these different domains.

Based on this reasoning, the following components

are deﬁned as goal models:

• Enabling Goals: These are human psychologi-

cal needs. The user experience outcomes are de-

pendent on these goals, hence deﬁned as enabling

goals. These high-level goals are ﬁrst deﬁned

within technology domain and then further reﬁned

into sub-goals to derive speciﬁc functionalities.

• User Experience Outcomes: This model identi-

ﬁes desired user experience outcomes. These out-

comes are enabled by the satisfaction of the iden-

tiﬁed human needs in the “enabling goals model”.

• Functionality Goals: Enabling goals are

achieved through the system functions identiﬁed

in the functionality goals model. Therefore,

apart from the system-centered functionality, this

model contains functionality supporting speciﬁc

human needs, i.e., human-centered functionality.

There are possibilities that more functions emerge

as enabling goals are reﬁned.

3.1 The Enabling Goals Component

This component represents the human needs set as ex-

plicit goals to be taken into account during require-

ments acquisition. This enables software engineers

and key stakeholders to focus on the appropriate set

of needs for a given system and justify the system re-

quirements accordingly. These goals may be reﬁned

in a way that the functionality goals component is able

to deﬁne explicit functions for each enabling goal.

This section explains how the needs are ﬁrst iden-

tiﬁed and then modelled during requirements speciﬁ-

cation.

3.1.1 Identiﬁcation of Human Needs

There are variety of psychological theories on iden-

tifying fundamental human needs. The authors in

(Sheldon et al., 2001) attempted to determine which

needs are truly fundamental for humans. They iden-

tiﬁed a set of 10 needs: autonomy, competence,

relatedness, self-esteem, physical thriving, security,

self-actualization, pleasure-stimulation, money lux-

ury, and popularity-inﬂuence. This set has a con-

siderable range and represents prominent theories in-

cluding Self-Determination Theory (SDT) (Ryan and

Deci, 2000; Ryan and Deci, 2017) within the lit-

erature. Out of these 10 needs, Sheldon et. al.

claim that the four needs, i.e., autonomy, compe-

tence, relatedness and self-esteem, are the most im-

portant ones. The METUX model also proposes au-

tonomy, competence and relatedness (core elements

of Self-Determination Theory) as the most critical

needs within HCI contexts. Their absence is linked

with ill-being and distress. The authors support their

claim by referring to empirical research carried out

by authors in (Ryan and Deci, 2017; Vansteenkiste

and Ryan, 2013), whose work revealed that the three

basic needs are the most predictive and reliable me-

diators of primary user experience outcomes: motiva-

tion, engagement and well-being.

Some of these needs may be more relevant for spe-

ciﬁc types of systems than others and not all of these

basic needs may be relevant for all types of systems.

Therefore, we propose to include all 10 needs identi-

ﬁed in (Sheldon et al., 2001) for a better representa-

tive set of needs that is applicable to a considerable

range of systems.

3.1.2 Modelling of Human Needs

The selection of basic psychological needs that are

most relevant for the system is an important step to-

wards modelling of the needs. Stakeholders involve-

ment at this stage is important. The discussions are

mainly facilitated by the designers in order to guide

the overall process from the perspective of realizabil-

ity of the selected needs. A challenge at this stage

may be that users are not necessarily aware of their

fundamental psychological needs and how these la-

tent needs may drive their choices and the quality of

their experiences. To this end, methods such as lad-

dering (Rugg and McGeorge, 1995) and experience

interviews (see e.g., (Fink et al., 2022) have been pro-

posed in the literature.

In order to demonstrate how to model a basic psy-

chological human need, we choose autonomy as an

example human need. As mentioned earlier in Sec-

tion 3.1.1, the motivation behind choosing autonomy

mainly comes from the work of Peters et al. in (Peters

et al., 2018). Also some aspects of human autonomy

are listed in (Grundy et al., 2022) among the keys ar-

eas of human aspects that need careful consideration

in software engineering life cycle.

The main challenge to model a human psycholog-

ical need is to deal with the fuzziness of its require-

ICSOFT 2023 - 18th International Conference on Software Technologies

132

Identiﬁcation

of Human

Needs

Deﬁnition

within

Technology

Reﬁnement

into Sub-

goals

Sub-goal 1

Sub-goal 2

....

Functionality

....

Functionality Goals

Enabling Goals

User Experience Outcomes

UX Outcome 1

UX Outcome 2

....

Enabling

Goals

Human-centered Functionality

Enabling Goal

(Human need)

Functionality

Contribution link

Decomposition

+ –

Contribution types

Legend

System-centered

Functionality

Correlation link

Identiﬁcation of

Functionalities

and their

Impact

Identiﬁcation

of UX

Outcomes

Figure 2: The details of the SUXEH framework shown in Figure 1 illustrating the framework guidelines and relationship

between its sub-components.

ments in technology domain. In order to address this

challenge, we propose the following guidelines in our

framework to model an enabling goal (basic human

psychological need) in the requirements phase:

• Deﬁne the enabling goal within technology do-

main to be clear on its meaning with the stake-

holders.

• Reﬁne the enabling goal into sub-goals in a way

that potential design solutions in the form of func-

tions can be driven out of them. This can be done

by following the steps below:

– Look into how the enabling goal is studied in

the technology domain. For this, the ﬁndings in

(Peters et al., 2018) provide a good summary on

how technology can help users develop a better

sense of autonomy for example.

– Use Jakob Nielsen’s usability heuristics

(Nielsen, 1994) of the user experience do-

main in order to explore usability design

requirements to support human autonomy.

In the following, the above process is illustrated

for autonomy as the example human need.

Deﬁning the Enabling Goal (Autonomy) Within

Technology: We ﬁrst need to look into the clear

deﬁnition of autonomy in the technology domain. As

mentioned in (Peters et al., 2018), autonomy does

not merely mean doing things independently, but has

a deeper meaning of acting with “high willingness

and in accordance with personal goals and values”.

It is important to mention here that the focus of our

framework is on human-centered requirements of

autonomy which differs from system-centered re-

quirements of autonomous systems like that of robots

and driverless cars. Human-centered requirements

of autonomy explores human autonomy as part of

overall psychological needs satisfaction.

Reﬁning the Enabling Goal (Autonomy) Into Sub-

Goals: After deﬁning and having consensus with

stakeholders on what is meant by autonomy generally

in the technology domain, the next step is to decom-

pose the enabling goals into sub-goals that are precise

Towards Integration of Sustainable User Experience Aspects in Systems Design: A Human-Centered Framework

133

enough to support design of potential solutions in the

form of functions. For this, we follow the guidelines

mentioned above by starting with studying how the

autonomy is studied in the past in the technology do-

main.

Various aspects of software systems have been

identiﬁed in the past (Friedman, 1996) that can sup-

port or hinder user autonomy, i.e., system capability

and complexity, misrepresentation and ﬂuidity. These

aspects are more focused on the direct impact of

the system’s use (referred as the Interface and Task

levels of user experience in Section 3.2.1) and not

the broader impact on other aspects of a user’s life

(i.e., on the levels beyond the Interface and Task).

Other studies (Ryan and Rigby, 2018) have identiﬁed

that systems that offer “options” and “customization”

helps in creation of a sense of autonomy and own-

ership. This type of autonomy design is familiar to

game designers and can have a broader impact on hu-

man’s life. We take these aspects (offering “options”

and “customization”) as guidelines for our ﬁrst crite-

rion to identify autonomy-enhanced system functions

in the functionality goals of our framework.

Authors in (Peters et al., 2018) highlighted the

fact that, all usability heuristics can be explained by

the needs of competence and autonomy. Following

their direction, we propose to choose Jakob Nielsen’s

10 heuristics of usability design (Nielsen, 1994) in

software systems design as valuable guidelines to im-

prove user experience. Nielsen’s heuristics are widely

accepted and well-supported in the user experience

domain. In addition, these guidelines are small and

easy-to-use, and hence can be equally used by non-

user experience designers and stakeholders. Follow-

ing are Nielsen’s 10 heuristics (Nielsen, 1994):

1. Visibility of system status

2. Match between system and real world

3. User control and freedom

4. Consistency and standards

5. Error prevention

6. Recognition rather than recall

7. Flexibility and efﬁciency of use

8. Aesthetic and minimalist design

9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from

errors

10. Help and documentation

It is important to mention here that the guidelines

given in the above heuristics are not applied as an

evaluation method of user interfaces. Instead they are

used as a valuable tool to reﬁne basic human needs

(enabling goals) into sub-goals that are more precise

in terms of their required system functionality.

For the sake of brevity, we summarize the factors,

that manifests the above Nielsen’s guidelines, in terms

of speciﬁc functionalities that can enhance sense of

autonomy (and competence): clarity on feedback and

available actions; provision of consistent and stan-

dard order of operations and language; clearly marked

emergency exits without extended dialogues; provi-

sion of constraints and conﬁrmation of risky actions.

Clearly, these factors can be satisﬁed with provision

of system functions and hence must be addressed in

requirements models. Though these factors are ex-

plained from the perspective of autonomy, they are

equally important for the psychological need of com-

petence (Peters et al., 2018).

3.2 The User Experience Outcomes

Component

The user experience outcomes are represented by a

speciﬁc component of the SUXEH framework. The

framework also represents the relationship of user

experience outcomes component with the enabling

goals component via the GRL contribution links (see

Figure 2). For the sake of comprehension of the

framework, this paper focuses on the following pri-

mary user experience outcomes: motivation, engage-

ment and well-being proposed in (Peters et al., 2018).

However, the framework is not restricted to these

outcomes and can include other outcomes as per re-

quirements. Various other models linking UX to

user/human goals have been proposed in the litera-

ture. An inﬂuential other view in this respect, is Has-

senzahl’s model of pragmatic and hedonic quality per-

ceptions (Hassenzahl, 2018). It differentiates user ex-

perience from usability as UX anticipates outcomes

beyond purely instrumental ones (e.g., efﬁciency, ef-

fectiveness) and is associated with the fulﬁllment of

what Hassenzahl calls “be goals” (e.g., relatedness,

stimulation, identiﬁcation) (Hassenzahl, 2018; Has-

senzahl and Roto, 2007).

Studies have conﬁrmed that elements of human

experiences like that of engagement and enjoyment do

not always contribute positively to sustainable well-

being. For instance too much engagement in video

games (see e.g., (Sarda et al., 2016) and media con-

sumption (see e.g., (Flayelle et al., 2020) can increase

the user engagement to the extent that leads to health

issues and impact overall well-being negatively. It

is because usually the technology design is focused

on the direct impact of the system’s use on humans

and not the wider impact on other aspects of a hu-

man’s life. Therefore, when we talk about sustain-

ICSOFT 2023 - 18th International Conference on Software Technologies

134

able user experience outcomes, it is important to dif-

ferentiate between immediate hedonic experience and

long-term eudaimonic experience as recommended in

the research conducted by (Ryan and Deci, 2017).

Experiences can be either eudaimonic or hedonic

or both (see e.g., (Hammer et al., 2018) for a clas-

siﬁcation). Eudaimonic experiences are more about

pursuing personal goals whereas hedonic experiences

are largely about “momentary pleasures” like relaxing

and with little lasting personal impact. Eudaimonic

experiences have long-term importance and are often

considered strongly related to the experience of mean-

ingfulness and well-being than hedonia. Further, eu-

daimonic experiences were also found to be linked

to positive affect in (Mekler and Hornbæk, 2016).

The distinguishing concepts of eudaimonic and hedo-

nic aspects of a user’s experience that result from the

use/anticipated use of a system facilitate the discus-

sions on avoiding certain functionalities/design deci-

sions (speciﬁed in the functionality goals component

discussed later in Section 3.3) that have long term

negative impact on human well-being.

3.2.1 Differentiating Levels of User Experience

In order to provide guidance on how to detach un-

healthy positive experiences from healthy ones that

contribute to sustainable user experience outcomes,

the authors in (Calvo et al., 2014) have emphasized

the importance of differentiating various levels of ex-

perience within which human needs can be inﬂuenced

by technology. Four different levels or spheres of ex-

perience are identiﬁed in the METUX model within

which need satisfaction can take place: (1) As part of

interacting with the technology via its interface (inter-

face level); (2) As part of engaging with technology-

enabled tasks (e.g. self-tracking) (task level); (3) In

relation to the over-aching technology-enabled be-

haviour (e.g. exercise) (behaviour level); (4) As part

of an individual’s overall life (life level).

As claimed by the METUX model, the consider-

ation of these different levels of user experience pro-

vide guidance on avoiding creating designs that are

need-satisfying (i.e., healthy) at one level and need-

frustrating (i.e., unhealthy or addictive) at another.

This facilitates to trigger the discussions between the

stakeholders and designers on calculation of positive

or negative impact of a certain design decision (a spe-

ciﬁc function) on the experience levels beyond mere

interface. Therefore, in order to obtain long-term sus-

tainable user experience outcomes we acknowledge

these levels of experience. Accordingly, we identify

positive and negative links between the framework

components that contribute positively and negatively

towards achievement of these sustainable user experi-

ence outcomes. More details on this are given in the

next Section.

3.3 The Functionality Goals

Component and Assignment of Its

Impact (Positive/Negative)

Traditionally, functional model of a system contains

those functions that are essential to make the system

work and explains what the system does. As depicted

in the detailed overview of the SUXEH framework in

Figure 2, we propose to upgrade this functional model

in a way that it deﬁnes or highlight explicitly also

those functions that support the fundamental human

needs.

The enabling sub-goals, resulting from reﬁnement

of human need (as explained for autonomy in Section

3.1.2), provide the required input for the functions

in human-centered functionality goal component. In

other words, this component manifests through its

functions that how the goals identiﬁed in enabling

goals component can be achieved. It is important to

mention here that we do not say that a goal is ac-

complished or satisﬁed in a clear-cut sense. But it

can be said that certain functions (design decisions)

may contribute positively or negatively towards ac-

complishment of a certain goal. In this way, the

framework can generate advance warnings to signal

negative (and positive) impacts of a certain human-

centered requirement to the next phases of the devel-

opment process.

As discussed earlier in Section 3.2.1, there is a

possibility that inclusion of a speciﬁc function that

satisﬁes a certain human need (enabling goal) at one

level of user experience may be need-frustrating in

terms of its negative impact on the higher levels

of user experience. Therefore, after deﬁning the

functions satisfying certain enabling goals/sub-goals,

there is a dire need to check whether the functionality

goals frustrate human needs on the levels beyond the

Interface and Task spheres of user experience. In or-

der to represent the relationship of how functions de-

ﬁned in the functionality goal component contribute

(positively or negatively) towards achievement of en-

abling goals, we use the GRL contribution links that

connects the framework components with each other

with explicit notations of “+” and “-” on the links rep-

resenting their positive and negative impacts respec-

tively (see Figure 2). The GRL contribution links

can have various degrees of impact but we only in-

clude links with positive and negative impacts in our

framework to keep it simple enough to be understood

by professional designers and non-professional stake-

holders equally.

Towards Integration of Sustainable User Experience Aspects in Systems Design: A Human-Centered Framework

135

It is clear that the functionalities deﬁned in the

functionality goals component not only contributes to

the enabling goals component but this helps towards

fulﬁlling user experience outcomes. Such side-effects

are called correlations in GRL that are represented

using dashed arrows as depicted in Figure 2.

In the following, we demonstrate how the above

guidelines can be applied to a case study, the Taxi

System.

4 A CASE STUDY: TAXI SYSTEM

This section explains a case study, a Taxi System, that

is here understood as a speciﬁc system example used

to explain the framework (also referred as a demon-

stration case in (Host et al., 2012)). The case study

is based on similar types of real systems but simpli-

ﬁed in order to investigate and illustrate the proposed

framework more precisely.

The Taxi System was proposed in (Fatima and

Bræk, 2016) for illustration of a systems modelling

approach. It is an example of distributed communi-

cating systems. These systems maintain ongoing in-

teraction with their environment. These are complex

systems difﬁcult to be designed because of the con-

currency involved in their interactions with the envi-

ronment and different parts within the system.

In the Taxi System, a user can book a taxi via an

online booking system. A taxi dispatcher keeps an

overview of the taxis and assigns an available taxi to

the requesting user. If no taxi is available, the user is

asked to wait. Once available, the taxi is assigned and

contacts the waiting user.

In the following, the framework is applied to the

case study to demonstrate how human psychological

needs can be modelled as functionality goals of a sys-

tem.

4.1 Identiﬁcation of Functions

Satisfying Enabling Goals: the

Functionality Goals Component

In this section, we demonstrate how the factors, re-

sulting from the reﬁnement of enabling goals as sub-

goals in Section 3.1.2, can be applied to the Taxi sys-

tem in order to identify its precise functions that have

the potential to satisfy basic human needs. The pro-

cess is illustrated by working around one basic need

(i.e. the autonomy) to exhibit how a human psycho-

logical need can be translated into functions that are

required to generate sustainable user experiences like

that of engagement for example.

We assume that the system-centered functional

requirements of the Taxi System have already been

identiﬁed and their functions are modelled. Here, we

are focusing on human-centered functionality compo-

nent that deﬁnes functions to support human auton-

omy in the Taxi System. The sub-goals reﬁned for au-

tonomy in Section 3.1.2 (i.e., offering “options” and

“customization”; visualization of system status, user

control and freedom (and other Nielsen’s heuristics

not explained in this section)) are generic enough for

HCI contexts. Against these generic sub-goals, the

following Taxi System autonomy speciﬁc functions

can be speciﬁed:

Generic Sub-Goal 1: Alternatives and/or Offering

Options

System-speciﬁc functions: A user can choose

• different types of taxis based on their price, size,

time-to-reach, distance from pickup point

• to change destination at run-time

• to change pickup location at run-time

• to register with speciﬁc proﬁles

• to register for rewards that are offered depending

upon how often they use the service

Generic Sub-Goal 2: Customization (Flexibility

and Efﬁciency of Use)

System-speciﬁc functions: A user can

• choose a taxi from preferred driver options (can

also improve relatedness)

• choose from favourite pickup/destination loca-

tions based on their past orders

• create favourite list of destinations/pickup loca-

tions

Generic Sub-Goal 3: Visibility of System Status:

System-speciﬁc functions:

• Overview of taxis on a map with all the alterna-

tives speciﬁed in the sub-goal 1 above.

• Taxis display other facilities they have like that of

a baby seat.

• Clarity on “Taxi booked” and “Taxi cancelled”

conﬁrmations and other initiatives taken by the

User.

• User is updated about their queue position

• User is shown the taxi remaining time-to-reach at

pickup location and destination.

Generic Sub-Goal 4: User Control and Freedom

System-speciﬁc functions: A user can

• cancel/exit the taxi ordering activity at all steps

while making the order

• cancel/exit the taxi order while in waiting queue

ICSOFT 2023 - 18th International Conference on Software Technologies

136

Autonomy

Offer Options Customization

User Control

and Freedom

Other Nielsen´s

Usability

Heuristics

Types of

Taxis

Change

Destination at

Runtime

Change Pickup

Loc at Runtime

Speciﬁc Proﬁles

Offering

Rewards

Favourite Pickup

Loc/ Destinations

by the System

User Preferred

Drivers

Favourite

Pickup Loc/

Destinations by

the User

Overview of

Taxis

Visibility of

Facilities

Offered by Taxis

Conﬁrmations

on User

Initiatives

Queue Updates

Visibility of Time-

to-reach

Pickup Loc and

Destination

Cancellation/

Exit while

Making the

Order

Cancellation/

Exit while

Waiting

Cancellation/

Exit after

Booking

Conﬁrmation

....

–

Visibility of

System Status

to User

Enabling Goal

(Human need)

Functionality

Contribution link

Decomposition

+ –

Contribution types

Legend

Enabling Goal(s)

Functionality Goals

Figure 3: The SUXEH framework applied to the Taxi System illustrating modelling of autonomy as an example human

psychological need.

• cancel taxi order after it is booked

The above functions are deﬁned on one view (in-

terface) of the system i.e., the customer view, and

hence all the functions are deﬁned from a customer’s

perspective. The Taxi perspective (not detailed here)

shall add more functions. It can be clearly seen that

the above functions of the Taxi System that contribute

to the human psychological needs are the functional

requirements of the system and hence must be ad-

dressed at this early phase of system’s development.

As described earlier in Section 3.3, we use the

GRL to represent modelling of human-centered goals

and to reﬁne them in terms of precise system func-

tions. Figure 3 illustrates graphically how autonomy

(an enabling goal) can be modelled in terms of less

fuzzy and more reﬁned functions (functional require-

ments) of the Taxi System. We utilize the GRL de-

composition links to denote decomposition of goals

into sub-goals and functions. The positive or neg-

ative contribution of a function towards achieving a

goal/sub-goal is represented via positive and negative

contribution links from GRL. We use the guidelines

of differentiating levels of user experience given in

Section 3.2.1 to mark these contribution links. For in-

stance, consider the example of the function named

“offering rewards” that contributes to the “offer op-

tions” sub-goal required to be designed for the sat-

isfaction of autonomy (see Section 3.1.2). Appar-

ently, this function increases engagement and motiva-

tion user experience outcomes mediated by increased

autonomy and competence human needs (see Section

3.1). However, this happens only at the interface level

of the user experience exhibiting the direct impact of

the system’s use. Because the criterion of “offering

rewards” is how often a user uses the Taxi System,

it can increase engagement to an extent where this

function has negative impact on a human’s overall

well-being. Hence, this “offering rewards” function

Towards Integration of Sustainable User Experience Aspects in Systems Design: A Human-Centered Framework

137

can contribute negatively towards achievement of au-

tonomy via “offer options” sub-goal and therefore its

contribution is marked with “-” sign. The framework

allows to signal this possible negative impact of the

function to the later stages of system development that

involves major design decisions. Hence, this indica-

tion helps designers to design such functions carefully

(with additional constraints that need adjustments for

positive impacts) in order to avoid need-frustrations at

higher levels of user experiences that impact overall

human well-being. For instance, the function of “of-

fering rewards” may be constrained only for long dis-

tances, and/or health warnings and saving money type

of incentives may be given to the user for avoiding the

taxi service for shorter distances. Alternatively, the

criterion of “offering rewards” can be changed to how

often the user uses a shared taxi to put less empha-

sis on individual taxi usage and more on the rides that

are more beneﬁcial for the environment and are less

expensive.

In the case, where certain functionalities are de-

cided to be dropped due to their negative impact, still

the information encompassing the reasoning can be

made part of documentation to avoid repeating the

discussions in the future.

5 DISCUSSION

We have emphasized that software systems design

decisions affect positively and/or negatively particu-

lar human psychological needs that contribute to sus-

tainable user experience outcomes. These needs are

not taken into account while requirements acquisi-

tion. This problem is addressed by our framework that

enables software designers to capture and represent

human psychological needs early in the software de-

velopment process when the requirements are elicited

and speciﬁed, and design decisions are justiﬁed, re-

ferred as the process-oriented approach in (Mylopou-

los et al., 1992) as opposed to the product-oriented

approach when the ﬁnal product is evaluated.

Unlike the approaches proposed in (Checkland,

1981; Hix and Hartson, 1993; Mayhew, 1999; Fa-

rooqui et al., 2019; Acu

na et al., 2012), and due to the

limitations listed in (Metzker and Reiterer, 2002), the

framework we propose does not integrate HCI or user

experience design process as a whole in the software

systems development process. However, we have

used HCI and user experience domain knowledge in

two ways: (1) In order to understand core elements of

human psychological needs we have taken guidelines

from a model (Peters et al., 2018) that explains these

needs and their relationship with sustainable user ex-

perience outcomes in the context of HCI; (2) We uti-

lize Nielsen’s usability heuristics (along with other

criteria that are driven by human psychology) not as

an user interface evaluation method but as an impor-

tant input towards modelling the human psycholog-

ical needs. These HCI and UX simple tools assist

in formalizing simplistic yet effective guidelines that

help in easy incorporation of basic human psycholog-

ical needs requirements in the software systems de-

velopment.

The SUXEH framework we propose includes no-

tion of human aspects from HCI/UX discipline that

help in building a more complete understanding of

human psychological needs. This more holistic per-

spective also allows to focus beyond those tradition-

ally considered as users (“user-centered design”) and

adopts a broader, human-centered view on those the

system is designed for or who may be affected by its

use (ISO 9241-210:2019(en), 2019). As explained in

Section 3.1, the human needs we emphasize leverage

mainly Self-Determination Theory (SDT) that pro-

vides an empirically validated approach to explore

factors that contribute to sustainable user experience

outcomes like that of well-being. We choose to

present detailed guidelines on how to model auton-

omy that is one of the three main constructs (along

with competence and relatedness) that has a deep and

clear link to more commonly verbalized concepts like

meaning or happiness (Ryan and Deci, 2017). Hence

the human emotions being modelled as target human

aspects in software requirements for instance in (Cu-

rumsing et al., 2019)), discussed earlier in the related

work, are actually the desired outcomes of basic psy-

chological needs satisfaction that our framework em-

phasizes on.

Our framework promotes user involvement in

terms of negotiations with stakeholders mainly fa-

cilitated by the designers. Since the human psy-

chological needs are explicitly modelled in terms of

system functions, the framework support early anal-

ysis of human-centered functional requirements in

terms of their realizability from the designer’s per-

spective. This will help in reconciliation of designer’s

and stakeholder’s point of views speciﬁcally on those

requirements that (1) negatively affect human well-

being, and/or (2) are not realizable from resource or

technical point of view (for instance, requirements

that may interfere with the system basic functional-

ity). Since the framework provides clear visibility

of reasoning (in terms of explicitly marked contribu-

tion links between the components) behind the deci-

sions made by the stakeholders and designers collab-

orations, agreed-upon (and leftover) human-centered

functionalities may be made part of the documenta-

ICSOFT 2023 - 18th International Conference on Software Technologies

138

tion elements important for future references speciﬁ-

cally to avoid repetition of the same discussions.

Finally, while the framework aims to support the

design of sustainable user experiences, we acknowl-

edge that human-centeredness in system design may

also trigger behavior that is unsustainable from e.g.,

an environmental point of view. For instance, in

the Taxi System, the “offering rewards” functional-

ity supports sustainable user experience in terms of

addressing human autonomy but it may result in the

usage of the system to an extent where it is not good

for the environmental sustainability.

6 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper, we have presented a framework which

we refer to as SUXEH (Sustainable User eXpe-

riences Enabled Human-centered) framework that

identiﬁes and represents fundamental human psycho-

logical needs (that are based on mature psychologi-

cal theories) explicitly as systems functions in early

stages of software development. With the help of a

case study, the Taxi System, we have demonstrated

how our framework can be applied to represent hu-

man psychological needs by modelling autonomy as

the detailed example need. This application of the

framework shows that our framework is generic in

a way that it is neither system speciﬁc nor end-user

speciﬁc. It applies to different types of human users

and equally to all types of software systems. We also

believe that the requirements models that result from

application of our framework can be used by all soft-

ware systems design methodologies. We look forward

to conduct empirical case studies/user studies that al-

low to further reﬁne and validate the framework.

We do not claim that our framework provides

complete guidelines on integration of human psycho-

logical needs in the early stages of requirement speci-

ﬁcations, but we believe that our framework provides

initial directions that guides beyond GUI design and

usability, and provides more holistic and realistic pic-

ture of integration to address broader impacts on hu-

man well-being and other long term eudaimonic as-

pects of sustainable user experience outcomes. We

emphasize that provision of this information in re-

quirements speciﬁcations acts as a signiﬁcant input

in making design decisions during software systems

development.

Our research presented in this paper can form

a useful starting point to further investigate generic

models of human psychological needs in software de-

velopment process. Creation of new design methods

or investigation of most appropriate design methods

that can be improved to incorporate human-centered

requirements is required. This is an open research

question and we are looking forward to address this

question in our future publications.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by the European Re-

search Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics

- ERCIM Alain Bensoussan Fellowship Programme.

REFERENCES

Acu

na, S. T., Castro, J. W., and Juristo, N. (2012). A

hci technique for improving requirements elicitation.

Information and Software Technology, 54(12):1357–

1375. Special Section on Software Reliability and Se-

curity.

Brown, J. (1997). Hci and requirements engineering-

exploring human-computer interaction and software

engineering methodologies for the creation of inter-

active software. SIGCHI Bulletin, 29(1):32–35.

Calvo, R. A., Peters, D., Johnson, D., and Rogers, Y. (2014).

Autonomy in technology design. In CHI’14 Extended

Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems,

pages 37–40.

Checkland, P. (1981). Systems thinking, systems practice

john wiley & sons. New York.

Curumsing, M. K., Fernando, N., Abdelrazek, M., Vasa,

R., Mouzakis, K., and Grundy, J. (2019). Emotion-

oriented requirements engineering: A case study in

developing a smart home system for the elderly. Jour-

nal of Systems and Software, 147:215–229.

Farooqui, T., Rana, T., and Jafari, F. (2019). Impact of

human-centered design process (hcdp) on software

development process. In 2019 2nd International Con-

ference on Communication, Computing and Digital

systems (C-CODE), pages 110–114.

Fatima, U. and Bræk, R. (2016). Modular solutions to

common design problems using activities and the

interface-modular method. In System Analysis and

Modeling. Technology-Speciﬁc Aspects of Models:

9th International Conference, SAM 2016, Saint-Melo,

France, October 3-4, 2016. Proceedings 9, pages

226–241. Springer.

Fink, V., Zeiner, K. M., Ritter, M., Burmester, M., and

Eibl, M. (2022). Design for positive ux: From ex-

perience categories to psychological needs. In HCI

International 2022–Late Breaking Posters: 24th In-

ternational Conference on Human-Computer Interac-

tion, HCII 2022, Virtual Event, June 26–July 1, 2022,

Proceedings, Part I, pages 148–155. Springer.

Flayelle, M., Maurage, P., Di Lorenzo, K. R., V

ogele, C.,

Gainsbury, S. M., and Billieux, J. (2020). Binge-

watching: What do we know so far? a ﬁrst systematic

Towards Integration of Sustainable User Experience Aspects in Systems Design: A Human-Centered Framework

139

review of the evidence. Current Addiction Reports,

7:44–60.

Friedman, B. (1996). Value-sensitive design. interactions,

3(6):16–23.

Granow, V. C., Reinecke, L., and Ziegele, M. (2018).

Binge-watching and psychological well-being: media

use between lack of control and perceived autonomy.

Communication Research Reports, 35(5):392–401.

Grundy, J., Khalajzadeh, H., McIntosh, J., Kanij, T., and

Mueller, I. (2021). Humanise: Approaches to achieve

more human-centric software engineering. In Evalu-

ation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering:

15th International Conference, ENASE 2020, Prague,

Czech Republic, May 5–6, 2020, Revised Selected Pa-

pers 15, pages 444–468. Springer.

Grundy, J., Mueller, I., Madugalla, A., Khalajzadeh, H.,

Obie, H. O., McIntosh, J., and Kanij, T. (2022). Ad-

dressing the inﬂuence of end user human aspects on

software engineering. In Evaluation of Novel Ap-

proaches to Software Engineering: 16th International

Conference, ENASE 2021, Virtual Event, April 26-

27, 2021, Revised Selected Papers, pages 241–264.

Springer.

Hammer, F., Egger-Lampl, S., and M

oller, S. (2018).

Quality-of-user-experience: a position paper. Quality

and User Experience, 3:1–15.

Hassenzahl, M. (2018). The thing and I: Understanding the

relationship between user and product. Funology 2:

from usability to enjoyment, pages 301–313.

Hassenzahl, M. and Roto, V. (2007). Being and doing: A

perspective on user experience and its measurement.

Interfaces, 72(1):10–12.

Hix, D. and Hartson, H. (1993). Iterative, evaluation-

centered user interaction development. Developing

User Interfaces: Ensuring Usability Through Prod-

uct & Process. New York: John Wiley & Sons, pages

95–116.

Host, M., Rainer, A., Runeson, P., and Regnell, B. (2012).

Case study research in software engineering: Guide-

lines and examples. John Wiley & Sons.

Iivari, J., Isom

aki, H., and Pekkola, S. (2010). The user–

the great unknown of systems development: reasons,

forms, challenges, experiences and intellectual contri-

butions of user involvement.

ISO 9241-11:2018(en) (2018). Ergonomics of human-

system interaction - Part 11: Usability: Deﬁnitions

and concepts. Standard, International Organization for

Standardization.

ISO 9241-210:2019(en) (2019). Ergonomics of human-

system interaction - Part 210: Human-centred design

for interactive systems. Standard, International Orga-

nization for Standardization.

Klemets, J. and Storholmen, T. C. B. (2020). Towards su-

per user-centred continuous delivery: A case study.

In Human-Centered Software Engineering: 8th IFIP

WG 13.2 International Working Conference, HCSE

2020, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, November 30–

December 2, 2020, Proceedings 8, pages 152–165.

Springer.

Mayhew, D. (1999). The usability engineering lifecycle: A

practitioner’s handbook for user interface design.

Mekler, E. D. and Hornbæk, K. (2016). Momentary plea-

sure or lasting meaning? distinguishing eudaimonic

and hedonic user experiences. In Proceedings of the

2016 chi conference on human factors in computing

systems, pages 4509–4520.

Metzker, E. and Reiterer, H. (2002). Use and Reuse of

HCI Knowledge in the Software Development Lifecy-

cle, pages 39–55. Springer US, Boston, MA.

Monge Roffarello, A. and De Russis, L. (2019). The Race

Towards Digital Wellbeing: Issues and Opportunities,

page 1–14. Association for Computing Machinery,

New York, NY, USA.

Mylopoulos, J., Chung, L., and Nixon, B. (1992). Rep-

resenting and using nonfunctional requirements: A

process-oriented approach. IEEE Transactions on

software engineering, 18(6):483–497.

Nielsen, J. (1994). Heuristic evaluation. John Wiley&Sons.

Orben, A. and Przybylski, A. K. (2019). The association

between adolescent well-being and digital technology

use. Nature human behaviour, 3(2):173–182.

Peters, D., Calvo, R. A., and Ryan, R. M. (2018). Designing

for motivation, engagement and wellbeing in digital

experience. Frontiers in psychology, page 797.

Rosenbaum, S., Bloomer, S., Rinehart, D., Rohn, J., Dye,

K., Humburg, J., Nielsen, J., and Wixon, D. (1999).

What makes strategic usability fail? lessons learned

from the ﬁeld. In CHI’99 extended abstracts on Hu-

man factors in computing systems, pages 93–94.

Rugg, G. and McGeorge, P. (1995). Laddering. Expert

Systems, 12(4):339–346.

Ryan, R. and Rigby, C. (2018). MIT handbook of gamiﬁca-

tion. Boston, MA: The MIT Press.

Ryan, R. M. and Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination the-

ory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social

development, and well-being. American psychologist,

55(1):68.

Ryan, R. M. and Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination

theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, de-

velopment, and wellness. Guilford Publications.

Sarda, E., B

egue, L., Bry, C., and Gentile, D. (2016). In-

ternet gaming disorder and well-being: A scale vali-

dation. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Net-

working, 19(11):674–679.

Sheldon, K. M., Elliot, A. J., Kim, Y., and Kasser, T. (2001).

What is satisfying about satisfying events? testing 10

candidate psychological needs. Journal of personality

and social psychology, 80(2):325.

Vansteenkiste, M. and Ryan, R. M. (2013). On psycho-

logical growth and vulnerability: basic psychologi-

cal need satisfaction and need frustration as a unify-

ing principle. Journal of psychotherapy integration,

23(3):263.

ICSOFT 2023 - 18th International Conference on Software Technologies

140