Investigations on user preferences of the alignment of process activities, objects and roles

Abstract

Numerous attempts have been made to research the variety of different influences on the understandability of process models. Common to all of these attempts is the limitation to the process model itself. Little empirical effort is spent on investigating the understandability of the alignment of process activities, objects, and roles. This paper tackles this issue and empirically studies preferences of how to visually align process activities with objects and roles. In particular, three visualization techniques are evaluated in order to support the combination of the object and organization units with their corresponding process model elements. The empirical study provides a strong support for the visualization of a process model that is disburdened from context information such as objects used and roles involved and thus is reduced to the sole visualization of process activities and its control-flow. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.