User-centered design of a visual data mapping tool

Understanding the meaning and the type of a business document received by a company is important in order to determine an appropriate response. We have developed a visual tool allowing ordinary users to express mappings between arriving documents and their elements on one side and the different document types on the other. The tool is used to set up and continuously update an automatic semantic analysis mechanism which determines the document type from a set of information items contained in the document, thus allowing automatic processing associated with the types to be applied to the arriving document instances. The activities performed by end users within the visual data mapping tool are quite complex and require user-centric design to ensure tool is useful and usable. In this paper we describe the user-centric process informing the design of the tool. We conducted two workshops to discover the mental models of our users regarding the information content in their documents and their requirements towards the design of the tool. Subsequently, these findings were used to design and implement the visual data mapping tool. The resulting system was evaluated by target end users who proficiently demonstrated the usability of the developed concepts and features. © 2012 ACM.