Enhancing the Usability of BPM-Solutions by Combining Process and User-Interface Modelling

BPMN has over the last years appeared as a major approach for modelling process-oriented solutions. The approach is meant to work well both towards human understanding and execution. Executability is normally based on a mapping of BPMN-models to BPEL and defining a form for each flow where the user is the source or target. As we argue in this paper. this often gives sub-optimal and inflexible user interfaces. This paper describes our experiences with using BPMN for process and task modelling and Diamodl for model-based user interface dialog design. Although the added expressiveness and flexibility comes at the cost of introducing a model-oriented approach for dialog design, the necessary modelling steps follows the same kind of logic that is needed when going from a conceptual BPMN-model to an implementation-oriented model for a naive generation of BPEL and forms UI, thus is interpreted as not extending the conceptual load of the approach significantly.