Nodes Afford Connection: A Pilot Study Examining the Design and Use of a Graphical Modeling Language

Abstract

External representations such as diagrams facilitate reasoning. Many diagramming systems and notations are amenable to manipulation by actual or imagined intervention (e.g., transposing terms in an equation). Such manipulation is constrained by user-enforced constraints, including rules of syntax and semantics which help preserve the representation’s validity. We argue that the concepts of affordances and signifiers can be applied to understand such representations, and we suggest the term graphical affordance to refer to rule-constrained syntactic manipulation of an external representation. Following this argument, we examine a graphical modeling language in terms of these graphical affordances, and we present a pilot study examining how participants interact with the modeling language. Preliminary results suggest that using the modeling language, as opposed to prose representation, influences user behavior in a manner aligned with the graphical affordances and signifiers of the modeling language.