Symbol choice and memory of visual models

Abstract

Most business process modeling languages are visual languages. Yet, very little attention has been devoted to the choice of symbols used. This article contributes to the visual languages literature by providing an enriched understanding about how symbol choice affects the ease of memorizing and recalling visual diagrams. Specifically, the experiment reported here was designed to compare the effect of three different symbol sets of visual languages from the business process modeling domain on diagram recall. Quantitative analysis based on data collected from 37 business school students, revealed that symbol choice significantly influences memory of visual aspects of the diagrams as layout. However, the study did not find a significant effect of symbol choice on recognition accuracy of the semantic content of the diagrams. Overall, the findings underscore the relevance of symbol choice for visual language design.