Emotion-based feedback classification for mobile tourism application (EMOTOUR) / Mohamed Ameer Azeez

Past studies have shown that the use of smartphones and mobile applications can greatly affect a user and their emotions. Nowadays, the use of mobile applications is ubiquitous and are popular. Tourism based applications are one of the popular applications that offer users with navigation, travel tips, travel plans and provide users feedback reviews. Even though tourism applications offers these features, it lacks the feature of emotion based feedback. This research proposes a classification of emotion-based feedbacks by using emoticons and a user interface design for emotive tourism mobile application (EmoTour). It begins by comparisons of current tourism applications, acquiring user feedbacks from interviews, analyzing the feedback through Thematic Analysis approach and presenting the prototype of EmoTour. The EmoTour is developed based on the emotion feature of feedback reviews that the users feel when they experience a certain location. The emotion feedback proposed contains the use of emoticons that are represented by acknowledged emoticons which represents all different emotions. With the implementation of EmoTour, anyone can benefit the use of the feedback review at anytime and anywhere using their smartphones. A selected group of informants consisting of two lecturers and three travelers had participated in interview sessions to provide the input for the content of the Thematic Analysis themes. The themes were then reviewed for the design of EmoTour application modules which lead to the findings of this research. The result of this research will become a reference to the application developers to improve the usability and emotional feature of user experiences (UX) of their applications.