Delta: a tool for representing and comparing workflows

Authors:
Nicholas Kong;Tovi Grossman;Björn Hartmann;Maneesh Agrawala;George Fitzmaurice
Affiliations:
University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States & Autodesk Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada;Autodesk Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States;Autodesk Research, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Venue:
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2012

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Abstract

Tutorials and sample workflows for complicated, feature-rich software packages are widely available online. As a result users must differentiate between workflows to choose the most suitable one for their task. We present Delta, an interactive workflow visualization and comparison tool that helps users identify the tradeoffs between workflows. We conducted an initial study to identify the set of attributes users attend to when comparing workflows, finding that they consider result quality, their knowledge of commands, and the efficiency of the workflow. We then designed Delta to surface these attributes at three granularities: a high-level, clustered view; an intermediate-level list view that contains workflow summaries; and a low-level detail view that allows users to compare two individual workflows. Finally, we conducted an evaluation of Delta on a small corpus of 30 workflows and found that the intermediate list view provided the best information density. We conclude with thoughts on how such a workflow comparison system could be scaled up to larger corpora in the future.