Usability of a mood assessment smartphone prototype based on humor appreciation

Abstract

Humor appreciation is one of the determinants of individual's mood and can be assessed through jokes. We have developed a functional prototype called Humoris which asks users to select the funniest punchline and register their affective response to the jokes. Based on users' responses, the application predicts and displays their short-term mood using emoticons. Our smartphone prototype is evaluated using the 'think-aloud' method with 9 participants. Usability of Humoris was examined by System Usability Scale questionnaire which gave an average score of 79.44 (SD=8.08). Based on our findings, participants liked the application interface as well as the mood prediction but some of them found some jokes difficult to understand.