Abstract
Understanding conceptual models of business domains is a key skill for practitioners tasked with systems analysis and design. Research in this field predominantly uses experiments with specific user proxy cohorts to examine factors that explain how well different types of conceptual models can be comprehended by model viewers. However, the results from these studies are difficult to compare. One key difficulty rests in the unsystematic and fluctuating consideration of model viewer characteristics (MVCs) to date. In this paper, we review MVCs used in prominent prior studies on conceptual model comprehension. We then design an empirical review of the influence of MVCS through a global, cross-sectional experimental study in which over 500 student and practitioner users were asked to answer comprehension questions about a prominent type of conceptual model - BPMN process models. As an experimental treatment, we used good versus bad layout in order to increase the variance of performance. Our results show MVC to be a multi-dimensional construct. Moreover, process model comprehension is related in different ways to different traits of the MVC construct. Based on these findings, we offer guidance for experimental designs in this area of research and provide implications for the study of MVCs.
Highlights
The complexity of contemporary information systems draws much attention to how their analysis and design can be supported by appropriate methods and tools
Conceptual modeling is a key task during system analysis and design, where professionals attempt to develop a representation of elements of a real-world domain that they believe to be important to consider when analyzing or designing information systems (Wand and Weber 2002)
We excluded data points if one of the following conditions was satisfied: As a first step we evaluated descriptive statistics with – Theory< 2: We were not interested in answers the view to perform different data cleansing and filtering from participants without any knowledge in process modeling
Summary
The complexity of contemporary information systems draws much attention to how their analysis and design can be supported by appropriate methods and tools. Conceptual modeling is a key task during system analysis and design, where professionals attempt to develop a representation of elements of a real-world domain that they believe to be important to consider when analyzing or designing information systems (Wand and Weber 2002). Thereby, conceptual models are used to facilitate a communicative process among relevant stakeholders, they document relevant process and data requirements pertinent to the implementation of a system, and they guide end users in operating and maintaining the system. For all these purposes, it is of importance that professionals are able to understand the content of these models to be able to reason about them. Other grammars focus on behaviors and dynamics of events and resulting actions in the real-world; these are important to understand how processes can be modeled or enacted in an information system (Dumas et al 2013)
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