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This paper presents a survey informing a user-first approach to designing calming affective haptic stimuli by eliciting user preferences in different social scenarios. Prior affective haptics research presented users with stimuli and recorded emotional responses. By contrast this work focuses on the sensations users wish to experience and how these can be simulated using haptics. The survey (n=81) investigated which users preferences in four social situations to reduce social anxiety. Using thematic analysis of responses we created a coding scheme of stimuli derived from real-world experiences to emulate with affective haptics. By cross-referencing these categories with affective haptics research, we provide recommendations to designers about which calming stimuli users wish to experience socially and how they can be implemented.

Gamification can change how and why people interact with software. A common approach is to use quantitative feedback to give users a feeling of progress or achievement. There are, however, other ways to provide users with motivation or meaning during normal computer interactions, such as using emotional reinforcement. This could provide a powerful new tool to allow the positive effects of gamification to reach wider contexts. This paper investigates the design and evaluation of a mobile to-do list application, 'Tamu To-Do', which utilises gamified emotional reinforcement, as seen in Figure 1. A week-long field study (N=9) recorded user activity and impressions with the application. The results supported emotional reinforcement's potential as a gamification strategy to improve user motivation and engagement.