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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:6000 |
| Date | 20 January 2018 |
| Creators | Mendling, Jan, Recker, Jan, Reijers, Hajo A., Leopold, Henrik |
| Publisher | Springer Nature |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10796-017-9823-6, https://www.springernature.com/gp/, https://link.springer.com/journal/10796, http://epub.wu.ac.at/6000/ |
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