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 land-scape elements and designs whereas, in the case of having contextual infor-mation, 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 de-signs of languages for process landscapes. They also may be useful for those who actually model process landscape diagrams and search for suitable notations.

1. An Empirical Investigation of the
Intuitiveness
of Process Landscape Designs
Gregor Polančič, Pavlo Brin, Lucineia Heloisa Thom, Encarna Sosa, Mateja Kocbek Bule
Business Process Modeling, Development, and Support
the 21th edition of the BPMDS series,
in conjunction with CAISE'20, 8-9 June, 2020

2. Background
• Large organizations may manage thousands of business process diagrams in their process
repositories, as they form a knowledge base, which enables a competitive advantage (Smirnov et
al., 2012) (Kunze et al., 2011).
• To maintain an overview, these systems of business processes have to be somehow organized and
presented.

3. What is a process landscape?
• A diagram aimed for representing organizational processes on a bird’s-eye view.
Innovation
process
Product planning
process
Product development
process
Marketing
process
Order management
process
Prototype
Product innovation
Product innovation
Product
specification
Customer
order
Stakeholders
Stakeholders
Market
challenge
Customer
expectations
Market
requirements
Innovative
products
Shipping

4. Positioning process landscapes in
a process architecture
Process landscape
Strategic process models
Operational process models
Process architecture
New order
received
Store
Prepare invoice
Maintenance
1.00 am
Perform online
store maintenance
Customer
Check products
availability
1 minute
Restart products
availability service
Send
products
status
Product status
Order
confirmation
received
Order confirmation
New product
received
Distribution center
Product
delivery
notification
Stock update
Send invoice
Invoice
Software update
New update
received
Perform online
store update
Zoom-in
Concretization
Zoom-out
Abstraction

5. Process landscapes VS. process diagrams
Process landscapes
• „Black-box“ process
• Synthesis of processes
• Depict relationships between processes
• Processes clustering
Process diagrams
• „White-box“ process
• Analysis of processes
• Depict „control-flow“ and other within-process
relationships
• Process decomposition
New order
received
Process order
Check
availability
No
Yes Ship order
Order shipped
Ordermanagement
process
Items available?
Order delayed

6. Process landscape designs
• No standardized languages for creating process landscapes
exist (Malinova et al., 2014).
• Consequently, organizations, as well as process modeling
tool vendors (e.g., ARIS Express, Visual Paradigm, Vizi
Modeler, and Signavio), define their own ‘overviews of
processes’ most commonly by imitating ‘value chain’
diagrams.
• What about BPMN 2.0?

7. Applying BPMN 2.0
• By default BPMN 2.0 does not support the wide
landscapes and complexities that exist in the
process-modeling domain (Van Nuffel and De
Backer, 2012)(von Rosing et al., 2014, p. 447).
• However, the evidence from academia and
practice show that BPMN is used for modeling of
process landscapes in an informal way (Muehlen
and Ho, 2008; Polančič et al., 2017).
• Lack of landscape concepts.
• Invalid BPMN 2.0 diagrams and/or
• Syntactically incompatiple with current landscape
diagrams
Abstract collaboration diagrams
Conversation diagrams
Enterprise-wide process diagrams

8. Variety of process landscape designs
Which design is „bettter“?

9. Enabling effective diagrammatic communication
User A User B
Interpreted
process
landscape
Interpreted
Process
landscape
Level of matching
(Effectiveness)
Effectiveness is positively impacted if signs (i.e. elements) are clear from its appearance alone!

10. Empirical research
• The main goal of our work was to investigate the intuitiveness of the representations of process
landscape designs as found in academia and industry. WHY?
• In case of intuitive representations, a user may infer the correct meaning from the appearance of a
notational element.
• In case of non-intuitive representations a user would be likely to infer a different meaning from the
appearance of a notational element  this could negatively impact the comprehension of a diagram
and corresponding decisions made.
• In this light, we defined the following research questions which could be tested empirically:
• RQ1: Are „common“ landscape designs semantically transparent to ‘novice users’?
• RQ2: How does the previous knowledge impacts the comprehension of process landscape designs?

11. Dependent variable: semantic transparency
• “The key to designing visual notations that are understandable to naïve users is a property
called semantic transparency” (Caire et al.,2013), which means that the meaning (semantics) of a
sign is clear (i.e. intuitive, transparent) from its appearance alone.
• In our research, semantic transparency was measured with the percentage of correctly identified
meanings of the investigated elements.
Caire, P., Genon, N., Heymans, P., & Moody, D. L. (2013). Visual notation design 2.0: Towards user comprehensible
requirements engineering notations. In 2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2013 -
Proceedings (pp. 115-124). [6636711] https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2013.6636711

12. Research approach
• Pre-experimental design, more specifically ‘one
group posttest only design’ (Christensen et al.,
2011).
• Subjects were introduced with individual or
groups (i.e. contaxtual information) of landscape
elements.
• Subjects‘ task was to associate the stated
representations with the provided definitions
(i.e. denotation mapping, decoding).
• Alternative depictions for an element were
provided (i.e. symbol redundancy).
Landscape element
Depiction Definition
(The meaning of an
element)
(e.g. a circle, a dotted
line, and a rectangle)
(e.g. a process, a collection of
processes, and a trigger relationship)
Denotation mapping

13. Online questionnaire
• Research was performed in January 2019.
• 588 subjects were invited to participate.
• 347 subjects partially completed the questionnaire.
• 302 subjects successfully completed the questionnaire.
• 65% of the subjects came from Slovenia,
• 35% of the subjects came from Ukraine.

14. Results
Expertise Male Female Slovenia Ukraine Total T. [%]
Inexperienced 80 68 102 46 148 49%
BPMN Expertise 34 18 44 8 52 17%
Landscape modeling expertise 7 9 10 6 16 5%
All 161 141 197 105 302 100%

15. Comprehensionof
landscapeelements Most consistently recognized as a
„Process“ element
BPMN experts recognize this
element as a „Process Collection“
Data-related elements were
consistently recognized.
Processes collections were NOT
recognized sucesfully.
Recognized either as a Process or
a Patipant
(depending of expertise)
„Support“ and „Management“
processes were consistently
recognized.

16. The impact of contextual information
Individual elements Diagram
12%
29%
12%
58%
72%
67%
Level of expertise: inexperienced users

17. Comprehension of between-processes
relationships (1/2)
Consistently recognized as a
conditional flow
Less consistent
responses
50%+ of BPMN and Landscape experts
associate this with an information flow.
29% Of all subjects associate this with a
„generic-specific“ relationship
38%+
of BPMN and Landscape experts
associate this with a „generic-
specific“ relationship.
38% of inexperienced users associate
this with a conditional flow.
of all subject associate this with a
trigger relationship.
of inexperienced users associate
this with an information flow.
36%

18. Comprehension of between-processes
relationships (2/2)
Of all subjects
recognized these with
sequentially
72%+
Of all subjects
associated these with
independent processes
72%+
63% Of all subjects associated this with
parallelly performed processes
73% Of all subjects associated this with
parallelly performed processes
66% Of all subjects associated this with
sequentially performed processes
Consistent responses in all cases

19. RQ1: Are „common“ landscape designs
semantically transparent to ‘novice users’?
Semantic
transpatent
Semantic
opaque
+
Semantic
perverse
Generic-specific
Support process
Sequentially
Management
process
Support
process
Participant
Process
Process
Datastore
Document
Conditional flow
Conditional flow
Sequential flow
Information flow
Generic-speciffic
Sequentially
Sequentially

20. RQ2: How does the previous knowledge impacts
the comprehension of process landscape designs?
Process(chevron)
Process(Archimate)
Supportprocess
Participant
Managementprocess
Processcollection
Database
Document
Collection(chevron)
Collection(Archimate)
Average
Inexperienced 29% 18% 12% 27% 12% 5% 59% 85% 1% 4% 25%
Landscapes 39% 25% 29% 20% 25% 22% 88% 92% 2% 2% 34%
BPMN 31% 25% 19% 19% 25% 13% 69% 88% 6% 0% 30%
Inexperienced in
landscapes and BPMN
Expertise in
landscapes modeling
Expertise in BPMN
modeling
Comprehension of landscape elements

21. Validity threats and Future work
• Misconceptions related to the specifications of concepts (naming, translations, …).
• Wrong focus of the subjects when inferring the meaning of the depictions (e.g. process
composition).
• Risks of generalization beyond the non-random sample.
• Limitations of self-reported expertise.
• In 2002 Hitchman stated: “Very little is documented about why particular graphical conventions
are used. Texts generally state what a particular symbol means without giving any rationale for
the choice of symbols or saying why the symbol chosen is to be preferred to those already
available. The reasons for choosing graphical conventions are generally shrouded in mystery”
(Hitchman,2002).
• On the path to standardization of landscape designs (e.g. via a common language) our research
may provide answers on how to effectively represents the language‘s concepts.

22. Thank you for your attetion!
gregor.polancic@um.si
Full paper is available as a Part of the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing book series (LNBIP, volume 387).