Empirical Study Evaluating Business Process Modeling on Multi-touch Devices

During business process modeling sessions it is difficult to prevent misunderstandings due to different expertise of the participants. Computers are supporting single persons at their work in various scenarios for quite a while. However, computers could not support reaching consensus yet and were not well suited for collaborative enterprise modeling. But now multi-touch input enables computer supported co-located collaborative work. Particularly, multi-touch tables seem promising to be beneficial for collaborative modeling sessions as sitting around a table supports discussions which can uncover misunderstandings. In this paper a collaborative business process modeling application is presented and evaluated in an empirical study. The study was carried out in 4 different test environments, including a multi-touch table. Finally, it is argued whether multi-touch tables really keep what they promise and whether they are better suited for business process modeling than other work environments.