Research Findings

Participants Description

Over the course of participants recruitment and user studies, we discovered an unique group of users who drive and facilitate establishment of new or improved business process in enterprise setting. These people often situate in the position comparable to IT department director or internal business consultant. Given the expertise in modeling and analyzing business process and a good understanding of what system can and cannot do, we labeled this role as business process expert. We further identified users with the role of business process expert as our target user group as they are in the most favorable position where composite application design would take place.

In the end, we conducted fourteen contextual inquiries on various users with different skill set in order to get the diverse perspectives on user research. The figure below maps all the users we have interviewed onto the spectrum of the skill set ranging from technology oriented to business oriented.

Key Findings

Our user studies showed that the business process expert often found the biggest challenge in managing human dynamics and fostering adaptation of business process change. Enormous amount of effort was focused on communication with various stakeholders through the means of visualization and prototyping of the to-be business process and/or maintaining comprehensive documentation. We further identified several other high-level user needs which are listed below: