Efficient Web Form Entry on PDAs

Abstract

We propose a design for displaying and manipulating HTML forms on small PDA screens. The form input widgets are not shown until the user is ready to fill them in. At that point, only one widget is shown at a time. The form is summarized on the screen by displaying just the text labels that prompt the user for each widget's information. The challenge of this design is to automatically find the match between each text label in a form, and the input widget for which it is the prompt. We developed eight algorithms for performing such label/widget matches. Some of the algorithms are based on n-gram comparisons, while others are based on common form layout conventions. We applied a combination of these algorithms to 100 simple HTML forms with an average of four input fields per form. These experiments achieved a 95% matching accuracy. We developed a scheme that combines all algorithms into a matching system. This system did well even on complex forms, achieving 80% accuracy in our experiments involving 330 input fields spread over 48 complex forms.