News

The paper "An Experimental Study of Intuitive Representations of Process Task Annotations" authored by Myriel Fichtner, Urs Fichtner, and Stefan Jablonski has been accepted for presentation and publication at the 28th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2022). Below you can find the abstract of the paper

An Experimental Study of Intuitive Representations of Process Task Annotations

Business process modeling languages support enterprises in visualizing workflows in a graphical representation.
Many studies provide recommendations about which modeling language to choose and how to represent models in terms of usability. However, there is no support in how to present detailed instructions regarding the execution of process tasks. We denote such instructions as task annotations which have to be considered during process execution to ensure process success. Integrating this information in an understandable way into process models is challenging and has not been sufficiently researched. This paper describes a novel study to address how task annotations can be presented in process models intuitively. In an experimental setup, we compare different representation formats for different task settings and evaluate them regarding the aspects effectiveness, mental efficiency and satisfaction.
We found empirical support that image- and diagram-based representations are intuitively comprehensible across all task settings regardless of the user's level of experience or education. Furthermore, we could statistically prove inferiority of textual task annotations.