Empirical Support for the Usefulness of Personalized Process Model Views

Business process models are a valued asset to support the communication between a range of business professionals. While it has been common to display process models in the same way as they are created, recent approaches support the use of personalized views on such models. This paper presents one of the first empirical studies that demonstrate the importance of model adjustment to end user preferences. In particular, the results suggest that end users can inspect a process model in accordance with their preferred style of granularity (modular or flattened) without any negative effects on their performance in making sense of such a model. This is a valuable result since it allows for a “separation of concerns”, i.e. automatic tools can take over part of the modeler's task with respect to addressing end user needs.