Reporting a user study on a visual editor to compose rules in active documents

In the last years, researchers are exploring the feasibility of visual language editors in domain-specific domains where their alleged user-friendliness can be exploited to involve end-users in configuring their artifacts. In this chapter, the authors present an experimental user study conducted to validate the hypothesis that adopting a visual language could help prospective end-users of an electronic medical record define their own document-related local rules. This study allows them to claim that their visual rule editor based on the OpenBlocks framework can be used with no particular training as proficiently as with specific training, and it was found user-friendly by the user panel involved. Although the conclusions of this study cannot be broadly generalized, the findings are a preliminary contribution to show the importance of visual languages in domain-specific rule definition by end-users with no particular IT skills, like medical doctors are supposed to represent.