Purpose: Despite corporate communications having an immense impact on corporate success, there is a lack of dedicated techniques for their management and visualization. A potential strategy is to apply business process management (BPM) approach with business process model and notation (BPMN) modeling techniques.Design/methodology/approach: The goal of this study was to gain empirical insights into the cognitive effectiveness of BPMN-based corporate communications modeling. To this end, experimental research was performed in which subjects tested two modeling notations – standardized BPMN conversation diagrams and a BPMN extension with corporate communications-specific concepts.Findings: Standard conversation diagrams were demonstrated to be more time-efficient for designing and interpreting diagrams. However, the subjects made significantly fewer mistakes when interpreting the diagrams modeled in the BPMN extension. Subjects also evolved positive perceptions toward the proposed extension.Practical implications: BPMN-based corporate communications modeling may be applied to organizations to depict how formal communications are or should be performed consistently, effectively and transparently by following and integrating with BPM approaches and modeling techniques.Originality/value: The paper provides empirical insights into the cognitive effectiveness of corporate communications modeling based on BPMN and positions the corresponding models into typical process architecture.

Business process diagrams represent an essential part of business process management activities, including process analysis, process-related communication, and process automation. While the majority of these artifacts are produced with modeling tools, there are still cases where hand-drawn diagrams are created, especially in the initial phases of process discovery and process innovation activities. The transformation of a hand-drawn diagram to digital format often presents several challenges. Thus, our efforts are directed towards investigating the effectiveness of an automatic transformation of hand-drawn diagrams into digital artifacts utilizing optical character recognition. To this aim, we performed empirical research in which subjects were instructed to redraw standardized process elements, which were afterward used for the training and testing set of machine-learning-based character recognition application. The findings obtained in the analysis showed that TensorFlow based and trained solution is capable of identifying hand-drawn process diagrams elements on different levels of accuracy. These insights may be considered when specifying or adapting the visual vocabularies of notations assuring appropriate visual distances between depictions of individual elements.

The existing body of knowledge reveals that customisable websites may lead to an increase in accessibility and usability for people with disabilities. In this way, the main goal of this research was to investigate how people with dyslexia respond to a customised version of a website in terms of its effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction and suitability when compared to the default version of the website. The customisation of the investigated website was enabled with the aid of integrated assistive technology that offers people with dyslexia the opportunity to adjust a website themselves in accordance with their individual needs, demands and preferences. They can do this by changing the parameters, such as font size, font type and contrast between the background and text. The answers to the research questions were obtained with complementary research methods and techniques, including formal usability testing, thinking aloud protocol, log analyses, questionnaires and interviews. The empirical results show that participants experienced more issues when interacting with the default website, and they enjoyed more benefits when using the customised website. Too much information on the screen, not enough graphic elements, issues with visual appearance and inappropriately presented information were identified as the most common issues when interacting with the default website. When using the customised website, all participants agreed on a better user experience and, as the majority of them reported, this was due to appropriate contrast and font size. Additionally, the majority of participants also expressed desire to use the individual website adjustments regularly in the future. The conclusions of this investigation are that the individual website adjustments used in this research can not only help to minimise issues, but also eliminate challenges that people with dyslexia have when interacting with a website. Therefore, the primary contributions of this research are the empirical insights of interaction with both the default and customised version of the website for people with dyslexia. Furthermore, this research also has three secondary contributions: (1) detailed presentation and application the general usability evaluation procedure to a specific target group (people with dyslexia); (2) recommendations to adapt the usability evaluation methods for people with dyslexia; and (3) the usage of quantitative measurement instruments for the evaluation of a website’s usability and suitability for people with dyslexia.