Martin
Frank & Pedro
Szekely
Information Sciences Institute
University of Southern California
Adaptive Forms is a tool for producing context-sensitive form-based interfaces. The system initially displays an overview of the main sections of a form, and an initial set of fields for the user to fill in. Depending on the values that the user enters, Adaptive Forms progressively adds new fields to the form. For example, a form for entering household information would show the user fields for entering the spouse's name only if the user had entered "married" in the "marital status" field.
The main design goal for Adaptive Forms is in entering structured information rapidly and without errors. One of our target applications was the specification of air campaign objectives, which are structured objects consisting of a verb (e.g., deny, gain), an aspect (e.g., what to deny or gain), an actor (e.g., country, a branch of armed forces), a location (e.g., a country or a region) and a time period. Each of the parts is itself a structured object whose substructure and possible values depend on the values specified for the other parts. For example, the aspects that can be gained are different from the aspects that can be denied, so the interface needs to compute the menus for the "aspect" field dynamically based on the fillers of other fields. Similar requirements arise in virtually any other application domain.
Note: the JFACC Plan Editor is a particular application of Adaptive Forms and can be found here.