Interaction Styles - Forms Dr.s Barnes and Leventhal

Reference  Chapter 8

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

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.

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.

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

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”

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.

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.

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.

Form fill-in/Summary  overhead - Advantages/Disadvantages  overhead - Table 3.2  Brain Surgeon Exercise/show solution