Designing a User Interface to Explore Collections of Directly-Follows Graphs for Process Mining Analysis

Process mining tools use Directly-Follows Graphs (DFGs) as the main means of visualization for exploring event logs and extracting valuable insights therefrom. Extracting significant insights from DFGs is a laborious process that involves multiple data manipulation operations and comparisons between the resulting DFGs generated after each manipulation. However, current process mining tools lack the ability to uniformly manipulate and manage multiple DFGs in a consistent manner. The objective of this study is to identify the requirements for designing a user-friendly interface to handle collections of DFGs to search for interesting visualizations for process mining analysis. To achieve this, three different data sources were used: a literature review of visual query tools, the analysis of LoVizQL, a query language for process mining, and the examination of reports from Business Process Intelligence Challenges. By combining these sources, insights into interface design needs aligned with real process mining applications were obtained. As a result, we have identified 14 requirements grouped into 3 main categories. These requirements serve as the basis to build future user interfaces of visual query tools for process mining.