Improving cognitive effectiveness of business process diagrams with opacity-driven graphical highlights

In order to facilitate the communication between the stakeholders, business process diagrams must be easy to understand. This is challenging to achieve, since they can become large and complex. In our previous work, we proposed Opacity-Driven Graphical , a novel approach for increasing the cognitive effectiveness of business process diagrams by changing the opacity of graphical elements and provided a prototype implementation of the approach. The goal of this study was to empirically validate if our proposed approach positively impacts cognitive effectiveness of business process diagrams and if the users will find the prototype implementation useful. To this end an experimental research was conducted where speed, ease and accuracy of answering questions were observed along with the perceived usefulness of the prototype. Participants that used Opacity-Driven Graphical significantly outperformed those that used the conventional approach. We can conclude that using Opacity-Driven Graphical increases the cognitive effectiveness of business process diagrams, while the corresponding prototype is perceived as being useful.