Incorporating Emotion and Personality-Based Analysis in User-Centered Modelling

Understanding complex user behaviour under various conditions, scenarios and journeys can be fundamental to the improvement of the user-experience for a given system. Predictive models of user reactions, responses -- and in particular, emotions -- can aid in the design of more intuitive and usable systems. Building on this theme, the preliminary research presented in this paper correlates events and interactions in an online social network against user behaviour, focusing on personality traits. Emotional context and tone is analysed and modelled based on varying types of sentiments that users express in their language using the IBM Watson Developer Cloud tools. The data collected in this study thus provides further evidence towards supporting the hypothesis that analysing and modelling emotions, sentiments and personality traits provides valuable insight into improving the user experience of complex social computer systems.