Insights for Improving Diagram Editing Gained from an Empirical Study
Michael Stegmaier, Alexander Raschke, Matthias Tichy, Eva-Maria Meßner, Sara Hajian, Anna Feldengut · 2019
The modeling process plays an important role in software and systems engineering. Models are often created on paper or whiteboards even though software for modeling exists. We conducted an empirical study to identify how diagram editing can be improved by investigating how people model on whiteboards. The study was designed as a qualitative study and had 34 participants from four different education fields. The participants were recorded in video and audio while performing two tasks in pairs on a whiteboard. In the first task they had to model a subset of a network plan of the local public transport system. In the second task they had to model the daily schedule of a canteen kitchen. After finishing the tasks, we conducted a semi-structured interview. Using this study, we identified minor different preferences between different education fields and gained several insights for improving diagram editing, e., g., support for drawing sketches concurrently and complementary to models, supporting flexible mechanisms for highlighting different parts of a model, better support for making shapes in the model look consistent.