Testing the Usability of Visual Languages: A Web-Based Methodology

Since loops in data-flow visual languages (Hils 1992) may be difficult to understand (Green and Petre 1996), we decided to test the usability of the solutions we devised for VIPERS, a data-flow visual language developed at the University of Pavia (Ghittori, Mosconi and Porta 1998). To get useful indications, we opted for a comparative analysis, also referring to the well-known data-flow language LabView (Vose 1986), where iterative constructs are implemented according to a totally different philosophy.