Improving the Developer Experience with a Low-Code Process Modelling Language
OutSystems’ Business Process Technology (BPT) language suffers from low adoption and high maintenance costs due to opaque semantics and counterintuitive operations. To optimize the low-code developer experience, this work proposes a language refactoring methodology that integrates principles of “symbolic physics” with engineering practice feedback, and—novelty—systematically embeds quantified user experience metrics (System Usability Scale, SUS; NASA Task Load Index, TLX) into the process language design loop. Through interview analysis, symbolic specification review, and empirical evaluation with 25 professional engineers, the revised language achieves a 38-percentage-point increase in semantic transparency (31% → 69%), a 38-percentage-point improvement in task response accuracy (51% → 89%), a statistically significant rise in SUS scores, and a marked reduction in TLX-measured cognitive load. This study establishes a reusable, user-experience-driven paradigm for designing low-code process languages.