Process design artifacts have been increasingly used to guide the modeling of business processes. To support users in designing and understanding process models, different process artifacts have been combined in several ways leading to the emergence of the so-called “hybrid process artifacts”. While many hybrid artifacts have been proposed in the literature, little is known about how they can actually support users in practice. To address this gap, this work investigates the way users engage with hybrid process artifacts during comprehension tasks. In particular, we focus on a hybrid representation of DCR Graphs (DCR-HR) combining a process model, textual annotations and an interactive simulation. Following a qualitative approach, we conduct a multi-granular analysis exploiting process mining, eye-tracking techniques, and verbal data analysis to scrutinize the reading patterns and the strategies adopted by users when being confronted with DCR-HR. The findings of the coarse-grained analysis provide important insights about the behavior of domain experts and IT specialists and show how user’s background and task type change the use of hybrid process artifacts. As for the fine-grained analysis, user’s behavior was classified into goal-directed and exploratory and different strategies of using the interactive simulation were identified. In addition, a progressive switch from an exploratory behavior to a goal-directed behavior was observed. These insights pave the way for an improved development of hybrid process artifacts and delineate several directions for future work.

流程设计工件已越来越多地用于指导业务流程的建模。为了支持用户设计和理解过程模型，已经以几种方式组合了不同的过程工件，从而导致了所谓的“混合过程工件”的出现。尽管在文献中已经提出了许多混合人工制品，但对于它们如何在实践中实际支持用户知之甚少。为了解决这一差距，本文研究了用户在理解任务期间与混合过程工件进行交互的方式。特别是，我们专注于DCR图（DCR-HR）的混合表示，结合了过程模型，文本注释和交互式仿真。按照定性方法，我们利用过程挖掘，眼动追踪技术，以及语言数据分析，以仔细检查用户面对DCR-HR时的阅读模式和采取的策略。粗粒度分析的结果提供了有关领域专家和IT专家行为的重要见解，并显示了用户的背景和任务类型如何改变混合过程工件的使用。对于细粒度分析，将用户的行为分为目标导向和探索性，并确定了使用交互式仿真的不同策略。此外，观察到从探索行为到目标导向行为的逐步转变。这些见解为改进混合过程工件的开发铺平了道路，并勾勒了未来工作的几个方向。