The dynamic visualization of business process models: A prototype and evaluation

Abstract

Business process models are commonly used for communication purposes among stakeholders. They are often distributed by means of web portals in the form of images. As the organizational population accessing these web portals has diverse needs and prior knowledge, the process models should be intuitive, likeable, well-accepted, and easily understandable [8] to reach their communication goal. Up to now, process models are mostly represented in a graphical but static, one-size-fits-all way. Visualization techniques have been applied at design time only to improve on the communication power of the model and support the model user in reading the model. The opportunity to dynamically guide model users to relevant parts of the diagram when reading the model is missed, and model users may not know where to focus their attention on. This paper provides a conceptual design for the dynamic visualization of process models. Our design is implemented in a prototype for a case study and evaluated by process participants. From this we conclude that such a dynamic visualization is preferred over a static visualization.