Redesigning Design/CPN: Integrating Interaction and Petri Nets In Use
Paul Janecek, Anne Vinter Ratzer, Wendy E. Mackay · 2000
This paper describes the redesign of the interface for Design/CPN, a graphical editor for building, simulating, and analyzing Coloured Petri Nets. One of our goals in the redesign is to explore how recent advances in graphical interfaces and interaction techniques can improve the editor’s support for CP-net designers. This requires an understanding of Petri Nets In Use, our term for the collection of guidelines, work styles, and interaction patterns that influence the way designers build CP-nets. This concept is central to our design framework, and has guided our design process. In this paper we describe our design framework and give an overview of our design process, a series of empirical studies, brainstorming sessions, and design exercises. We then follow two key issues (setting graphical attributes and alignment) through our design process, and describe how the Petri Nets In Use perspective influenced the evolution of toolglasses and magnetic guidelines as solutions for these issues in the new tool.