Business Process Modeling Applied to Personal Productivity in the Consumer Mobile App Market
The
main uses of mobile systems (smartphones and tablets) in the consumer market
include social networking, content sharing and personal productivity. Some of
these aspects sometimes converge, like in the case of social networking and
personal productivity (including todo list and planning), which merge into
socialization of task management, which is currently supported by a plethora of
online services directed to the final user. These tools are extremely user
friendly, allow to manage personal tasks, social interactions, and even
assignment of tasks to friends. However, all these tools share a common
weakness: they don’t provide any way for structuring the interactions,
dependencies or constraints between tasks. In technical terms, these tools do
not embrace event the most basic practices of business process management,
leaving it alone their integration with social networking capabilities, as
studied in the Social BPM discipline. In this paper we discuss how the
combination of model-driven development approaches [3], social networking and
business process management (BPM) techniques can be fruitfully applied to
personal and social task management, in a consumer scenario. Our aim is to
devise user-friendly mobile applications that hide the complexity of modeling
behind extremely simple interfaces and interaction paradigms. The main
challenge addressed is related to finding the appropriate level of complexity
to be exposed to the user, because the expressive power should be complete
enough for describing basic processes but also simple enough to let people
understand, accept and use them in their everyday life. This must then be
combined with social networking and content sharing capability. We show the
results of our studies at work in a commercial mobile application called
Fluxedo (www.fluxedo.com). Fluxedo is a mobile app that allows users to create
lists of items (i.e. activities), and assign those to other users via social
networking means. Fluxedo can be seen as a to-do list app that integrates
traditional features with new ones: users within a group of tasks (flow)
receive notifications and can interact with the flow explicating whether they
have already completed the task or not, as well as adding new tasks in the flow
and change the tasks order.
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