Alignment of Business Processes and
User Interfaces in the Context of Large
Organizations
Kênia Sousa, Hildeberto Mendonça, Jean Vanderdonckt
Université catholique de Louvain (UCL)
Louvain School of Management (LSM)
Belgian Laboratory of Computer-Human Interaction (BCHI)

Why?
• Do process performers know how their business runs?
• Usability of software in BP execution is as important as
handling industrial machinery to the quality of the product.
• A study has shown that alignment with UI contributed to
100 to 200% user productivity gains (Henry, 2007).

About Usi4Biz

Methodology
4

Forward Approach
5

Backward Approach
6

ROI of Scenarios
• Scenario 1 deleting repeated UIs
– Impact: Higher productivity of users when processing
orders
• Scenario 2 write info on paper
– Impact: avoids losses from input of wrong data

Business Process Models
• A process notation is transformed into
BPMN unifying the business
representation.
8

BP and Task Model
• The hierarchy from processes and sub-
processes inspires the task model.
• .
9

User Interface Model
• Grouped and related tasks define the
user interface model.

Final User Interface
• If UIs already exist then the user
interface model is extracted from them.
Screen
Screen
Fragments
Screen
Elements

Impact Analysis
• Perform impact analysis when changes are
made on business processes, tasks and UIs.
12

Support for decision makers
• Is the user interaction a bottleneck for the performance
of the process?
• Can the business process be improved based on
efficient user interfaces that allow a faster execution of
many activities?
• Are people navigating through the system in the same
sequence of the business process or have they identified
a better way to do the same thing?
• Which user interfaces are missing to be part of the
scope of the next iteration?
• Using a catalog of user interfaces, which activities can
be automated using existing user interfaces?
• Which user interfaces will be rarely used for the purpose
of the organization and can be discarded or disabled
from a product? 13

Dissemination
• Journal
– International Journal of Universal Computer Science, Special
issue on Human-Computer Interaction, Nov. 2008.
• Research Conferences
– 7th International Conference on Computer-Aided Design of
User Interfaces - CADUI’08.
– 3rd IEEE/IFIP International Workshop on Business-Driven IT
Management - BDIM 2008.
– 23rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing -
SAC’2008.
– ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive
Computing Systems EICS’2009
– 8th Task Model and Diagrams for User Interface Design –
TAMODIA’09
• Industrial Conferences
– SIGCHI Belgium Fall Conference – SIGCHI.BE’2009
– The Java Community Conference - Devoxx’09.

Thank you!