Design space for focus+context navigation in web forms

Abstract

Navigation in long forms commonly employs user interface design patterns such as scrolling, tabs, and wizard steps. Since these patterns hide contextual form fields outside the viewport or behind other tabs or pages, we propose to apply the focus+context principle from information visualization to form design. This work presents a design space analysis to support usability engineering of focus+context form navigation. We evaluated the design space's usefulness and applicability in a case study and found the design space has fostered creativity and helped to clearly document design decisions, indicating it can be a valuable support for engineering intelligent, form-based user interfaces.