Utilizing The Capabilities Offered By Eye-Tracking To Foster Novices' Comprehension Of Business Process Models

Business process models constitute fundamental artifacts for enterprise architectures as well as for the engineering of processes and information systems. However, less experienced stakeholders (i.e., novices) face a wide range of issues when trying to read and comprehend these models. In particular, process model comprehension not only requires knowledge on process modeling notations, but also skills to visually and correctly interpret the models. In this context, many unresolved issues concerning the factors hindering process model comprehension exist and, hence, the identification of these factors becomes crucial. Using eye-tracking as an instrument, this paper presents the results obtained of a study, in which we analyzed eye-movements of novices and experts, while comprehending process models expressed in terms of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0. Further, recorded eye-movements are visualized as scan paths to analyze the applied comprehension strategies. We learned that experts comprehend process models more effectively than novices. In addition, we observed particular patterns for eye-movements (e.g., back-and-forth saccade jumps) as well as different strategies of novices and experts in comprehending process models.