An Empirical Investigation of the Intuitiveness of Process Landscape Designs

Process landscapes define the scope and relationships between an organization’s business processes and are therefore essential for their management. However, in contrast to business process diagrams, where nowadays BPMN prevails, process landscape diagrams lack standardization, which results in numerous process landscape designs. Accordingly, our goal was to investigate how intuitive are current landscape designs to users with low expertise, as well as users having expertise in BPMN and landscape modeling. A total of 302 subjects participated in the research showing that previous expertise impacts the interpretation of landscape elements and designs whereas, in the case of having contextual information, subjects responded more consistently. The results also show that the basic relationships between processes are intuitive to users, also in the case when only proximity between shapes is facilitated. Our findings may imply future designs of languages for process landscapes. They also may be useful for those who actually model process landscape diagrams and search for suitable notations.