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 paper we present an experimental user study that we 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 us to claim that our visual rule editor based on the OpenBlock framework, can be used with no particular training as proficiently as with a specific training and it is found user-friendly by the user panel involved. Although the conclusions of this study can not be broadly generalized, our 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.