[IxDA Discuss] Small usability issue - forms

[Jim Drew]

>From: Jack Moffett <jmoffett at inmedius.com>
>
>Automatically moving the cursor from field to field makes sense when  
>an item of information that the user considers to be a single entry  
>is broken into multiple fields. For example, a phone number separated  
>into three fields would benefit from "auto-tabbing" as the user  
>quickly types in the full number. I've also seen software serial  
>numbers that work this way, where the long number is chunked into  
>shorter sections.

I've found this to work fairly well in the 40-digit software serial numbers case, because the user figures out whether the auto-tabbing will occur or not after the first box, and can put that info to use on the next nine.  (It's especially usueful if the design also eats hyphens and tabs "correctly" so that a user can type in just the number, or an xxxx-yyyy-... sequence, or tab every four characters and still get the right behavuior.)

On phone numbers, there are usually only two, maybe three boxes (and the "correct" eating of tabs and such is rarely done there), so the ability to identify whether auto-tab is present and make use of it for the next box is minimal.  (Often there isn't a next box, or at least auto-tab often doesn't work for exiting phone number to the next box.)

I would say that the value imparted to the user is low enough in the phone number case that you shouldn't bother.  Unless there's some visual UI (Icon?  A happy magic AJAX widget?) to cue the user that "these fields act in a useful way because we can predict what should go in them" and thus how they will behave.  Any examples of that cueing out there?

-- Jim Drew
   Seattle, WA