Happy participants

Although happiness is one of the most important issues in life, it is one of the most difficult research areas to study. It is an interdisciplinary issue that many factors should be considered. Happiness and well-being has been studied for a long time in psychology, economics, linguistics, informatics etc. According to Diener and Chan (2011) average people generally said that having what they want most in life is happiness. It also has a cultural aspect. We conduct research to measure happiness in Erciyes University between 2017-2019. We measure approximately 1200 participants’ happiness. According to our results, we can persuade software users’ to increase their happiness. Our research is on going in the topic.
Measuring happiness


Measuring happiness is an important issue for many disciplines. Many researchers have measured happiness with a questionnaire method. Some important scales in the literature are: Single-Item Measurement of Happiness (Abdel-Khalek, 2004); Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubomirsky and Lepper, 1999); Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) (Diener et al., 1985); Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (Hills and Argyle, 2002); and Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index (Ura et al., 2012). Happiness measurement is done by asking people how happy they are. Two main approaches are used. Experience sampling (Larson & Csikszentmihalyi, 2011) and day reconstruction (day reconstruction) (Kahneman et al., 2004). You can ask yourself if you are happy or not and give a ratio between “1 (very unhappy) to 9 (very happy)”. The result will give you an idea about your subjective happiness. You can use Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (Hills and Argyle, 2002) or authentic happiness questionnaires (https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/ ) to measure your subjective happiness.

Increasing happiness


Trying to feel being happy makes us happy some. Software helps users' to remind the activities which increase their happiness in daily time. According to our findings managing users’ time makes them happier but the time is not the only factor to manage happiness. Participants were unhappy because of not to achieve their aims. In addition there are some more cultural factors like socializing, pleasure or kindness. Doing favorite activities such as listening to music and spending time with favorite things also affect happiness. You can easily give yourself points depending these factors, activities and your aims. We are investigating the requirements of the software which manage users’ happiness. According to our findings, personality is another factor in managing happiness. According to our findings, comparisons according to personality factors can also persuade to increase happiness. You can use “Big 5 Personality Traits Test” to understand your personality traits. Depending your personality type, you can maximize your happiness. We present personas in our research.