Interaction Styles Forms

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Interaction Styles - Forms

• Dr.s Barnes and Leventhal

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Reference

• Chapter 8

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Form Fill-in

• Form fill-in user interfaces are modeled after
  paper forms
• Users see the virtual form and fill in fields

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Form fill-in/Advantages

• Use of form is primarily recognition.
• Only recall required is what constitutes legal
  data for fields.
• Especially useful for
• Intermittent (infrequent) users
• Tasks with a lot of data entry.

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Situations which call for forms

• Infrequently performed tasks
• Form and its fields can provide cuing to remind
  users of what type of data is appropriate and
  what a legal format is.
• Data entry tasks Data entry tasks generally
  require few choices between options as the user
  is entering data, but many keystrokes pertinent
  to the data itself. Forms allow the user to
  enter the data with few keystrokes spent on
  selecting options (as compared to menus) Data
  entry tasks also benefit when the user can see
  the data that they have just typed to provide
  contextual cuing. Because forms generally show
  mostly entered data (as opposed to the visual cue
  of a graphical or direct manipulation interface)
  they are once again a good choice for data entry.
• Intermittent (intermediate knowledge user)
• Because of cuing, user does not need to relearn
  the formats and types of required data (as
  compared to command line interactions).
• Because of the familiarity of paper forms, users
  can apply their prior knowledge to form
  interactions.
• Many web-based and database applications use
  forms for data input and for intermittent users.

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Typical Form Components

• A form typically consists of
• a series of fields.
• an id, a title, and/or help text
• A field consists of
• an id (often a variable name), a prompt, help
• text, and information about the value to be
  entered into the field, such as type, range,
  default value,and current value.
• May have an embedded menu for some fields like
  dates

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More Characteristics of Forms

• Typically, form filling is done on a screen (it
  could be done over the phone)
• . In addition to these basic parts of a form,
  there can be entry and exit conditions and
  actions for the form and its fields. Eg. Submit

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More on Entry and Exit

• A form or subform may not apply in some
  situations, and a failed entry condition will
  inhibit its activation.
• When a form is entered, the action of displaying
  all or some fields might be taken, and the
  current values for fields might be displayed.
• When a field is entered, the action of modifying
  its appearance might be taken to tell users it
  can be modified, an input editing buffer from an
  interaction library would be activated and when
  the field is left, the appearance would revert.
• Validation for field values might be coded as
  exit conditions for
• individual fields, while inter-value validation
  might
• be coded as an exit condition for the whole form.

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Form fill-in/Issues (1)

• Helping users understand how to perform error
  correction.
• Distinguishing between data and commands.
• Eg. the enter (return) key may serve strictly as
  a command key or may be permitted data.

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Form fill-in/Issues (2)

• Choices of field titles and other mnemonics.
• Spacing of fields.
• Type and amount of feedback to user.
• Usually not sufficient to just take a paper form
  and translate it to an electronic version.

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Form fill-in/Summary

• overhead - Advantages/Disadvantages
• overhead - Table 3.2
• Brain Surgeon Exercise/show solution

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