Tag: fluxedo

An Empirical Study on Simplification of Business Process Modeling Languages

by Marco Brambilla, posted in data science

Today I gave my presentation of our Empirical Study on Simplification of Business Process Modeling Languages at the Conference of Software Language Engineering, in Pittsburg, PA (co-located with Splash 2015).

You can find the full presentation here below, and some more details in this post by Eric Umuhoza on Jordi Cabot’s blog.

The work is based on the fact that the adaptation, specially by means of a simplification process, of modeling languages is a common practice due to the overwhelming complexity of most standard languages (like UML or BPMN), not needed for typical usage scenarios while at the same time companies don’t want to go to the extremes of defining a brand new domain specific language.

Unfortunately, there is a lack of examples of such simplification experiences that can be used as a reference for future projects. In this paper we report on a field study aimed at the simplification of a business process modeling language (namely, BPMN) for making it suitable to end users.

Our simplification process relies on a set of steps that encompass the selection of the language elements to simplify, generation of a set of language variants for them, measurement of effectiveness of the variants through user modeling sessions and extraction of quantitative and qualitative data for guiding the selection of the best language refinement, as shown here:

We describe the experimental setting, the output of the various steps of the analysis, and the results we obtained from users. Finally, we conclude with an outlook towards the generalization of the approach and consolidation of a language simplification method.
Out of this, you can also find an overview on how these results have been used by Fluxedo, a startup around a mobile app for social task planning.

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Why we built an app and why we got featured as best app in the Apple store

by Marco Brambilla, posted in data science

It took years, countless hours of work and conceptual effort by a good bunch of people, but last December we delivered our flagship app Fluxedo to the Apple Store and Android Play Store.
And yes, we got featured as best new app in the Apple store.
This was a great surprise, for several reasons:

  • we built Fluxedo with cross-platform, non-native technologies
  • the UX was pixel-perfect wrt the Google material design guidelines
  • we didn’t advertise, push or apply any PR techniques on the app
And anyway, we got selected by Apple.
How was that?
I think three main points contributed to this success are:
  • detailed studies of UX, feedback from user panels, and expertise in usability
  • maniacal care on the implementation issues, performance, and testing of features
  • solid data management architecture
  • long-term research underneath the concept of the app (as apparent from various scientific publications that feature the technical aspects of the product: we got papers accepted at BPMS2 2012, MobileSoft 2015, ICWE 2015, and SLE 2015)
All this allowed a resulting app that is undistinguishable from native ones and works perfectly on any device.
Add to this a continuous improvement and evolution philosophy, and you get the core of the values of Fluxedo. WE are now working intensively on a new version of the app, completely re-engineered, to further improve the user experience and performance.
You can get an idea of the app from this video (or visit www.fluxedo.com):

 

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EventOmeters by Fluxedo: the new actor in Event Management. Mobile app + social media (semantic) analytics + IoT

by Marco Brambilla, posted in social network analysis

Following up on my recent perspective that moves from model-driven development to hidden-model products, together with the Fluxedo team and in collaboration with WebRatio and Eurotech, we launched a new product called EventOmeters.

EventOmeters allows businesses and event organizers to increase the effectiveness of their events, involving participants and being able to rely on certain measures for the analysis of returns on investment in trade fairs, music, sports and in general of any gathering of people.
The role of the partners is as follows:

  • WebRatio is a leading provider of tools, methods and services for the rapid production of customized applications,
  • Fluxedo is an innovative start-up focusing on mobile app development, social network integration, and semantic social media analytics,
  • Eurotech will integrate data from IoT sensors whose data is made available realtime through cloud technology.
EventOmeters has been already used in the context of the FuoriSalone, within the Milano Design Week. In this setting, the product featured around 20.000 downloads of the official mobile app of the event and an analysis of more than 110.000 social media posts.
You can find more on this at:
Here is the storified summary of the launch event that happened on April 21, 2015 in ExpoGate in Piazza Castello in Milano, Italy:
To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).

Fluxedo – your personal flow manager: model-driven strikes back for end users?

by Marco Brambilla, posted in data science

After months of intensive preparatory work, we are ready to announce a new initiative that starts from the model-driven engineering research but then targets end users: the upcoming mobile app called Fluxedo!

Fluxedo is a personal flow manager that allows you to easily create and share your tasks with friends and colleagues. Fluxedo lets you involve the people around you, keep up to date on the progress of the flow and reach your goals faster.
Fluxedo is based on the model-driven research on personal process management and aims at bringing it to the consumer market.
It is the result of a domain-specific modeling study for understanding the best way for describing processes from the consumer perspective.

You can read more on the fluxedo.com web site, but I can anticipate we already have a Alpha version of the app, and we plan to release the Beta version within the next 3-4 months. Aside, I’d like to mention that the project comes out from M.Sc. works at Politecnico di Milano and already won two startup challenges.
At this point though, I would like to ask a small action from your side:

.. and I know, it’s Valentine day, so I hope you get in love with this app!

To keep updated on my activities you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog or follow my twitter account (@MarcoBrambi).