The Problem

Hi friends,I think now your are clear why do we need human interaction in a business process. Let me go ahead with our project idea.

WSO2 , an opensource middleware company in Sri Lanka has developed a Business Process Server . There we can deploy business processes written in WS-BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language). To get the human interaction in the middle of a business process the human tasks are written in WS-Human Task. It will invoke the WSDL when a human interaction is needed.

A user interface (UI) is needed to get the human interaction to a business process. Currently the UI is limited to a textbox and a submit button and it is automatically generated using JSP. In Shahani madam's words "it is ugly as ever". A textbox and a submit button is not enough to capture the various types of user inputs. With the limited features in the UI users can do lots of mistakes.

As an example they can enter anything where they only supposed to type their gender in the textbox. But there will not be any mistakes if we put two option buttons grouped together to get the gender input.

Our project is to address these issues and come up with a solution to design UIs considering the best practices of User Interface designing, a sub area of Human Computer Interaction. The designed UIs should also be displayed in the web browsers and android phones.

I will write you about our proposed solution in my next post.

take care friends.

Human Computer Interaction for a Business Process

Hi friends, I am writing here to give to some idea about our final year project idea.

I'll start my story assuming all of you are dumb, as much as we were at the start of the project.

Today's world there are so many technologies invented to make our lives easy and to make our selves little bit lazy. And all of us know the easiest way to climb the ladder of success is having good communication. So communication also plays a major role in modern business world.

Web service is also such a method of communication between two electronic devices over a network and it can convert our applications into web-applications. They are published, found and used through the web. "AH" that sounds good. Then we can easily access some application over internet with the help of web services.

We all know now most of the things are automated, but in some situations the system give you (assume u are a human, well vampires are also count) the chance to make a decision. Now you might wonder what are those occasions.

Think about a web service which gives you details about bank loans. It is up to you to decide which loan suites you the best. You will make the decision by looking at the interest rate and the loan duration, monthly payments etc. Now see, it is clear that at some point a business process might need your decision to proceed and that is a human task, only a human can decide and choose. At that point point human will interact with the system and human computer interaction happens.

Introduction

Humans often need to participate in the execution of a business process.User interactions range from simple scenarios, such as manual approval, to complex scenarios where data is entered by the user.

The services “implemented” by people are known as Human tasks. They allow the integration of humans in service-oriented applications. A human task has two interfaces. One interface exposes the services offered by the task, like a translation service or an approval service. The second interface allows people to deal with tasks, for example to query for human tasks waiting for them, and to work on these tasks.

This scenario introduces new aspects in to developers consideration such as interaction between the process and user interface, and taking into account human behavior. When designing user interfaces, designer should care about HCI (Human Computer Interaction) aspects. So, the need of a dedicated tool for generating user interfaces is important in many ways.

Under this project, we are going to implement a tool for creating user interfaces.It will also consider the HCI aspects. We will integrate the tool to WSO2 Business Process Server ( an open source business process server that executes business processes written using the WS-BPEL ;Web Service-Business Process Execution Language standard.) Support for different views (web interfaces, mobile interfaces) will be also taken in to account.