Designing Usable Forms: The Three-Layer Model of the Form  

Why do people say 'I’m not good with forms' or 'I don’t like forms' when a form is only a piece of paper, or a screen, with some printing on it? There must be something special about forms that inspires these comments. The 'three-layer model” considers forms from three points of view: perceptual (layout), conversational (questions and answers) and relationship (the structure of the task). Analysing a form using the three layers helps to un-pick its problems, and to suggest ways of making it more usable.

Jarrett, Caroline. STC Proceedings (2000). Design>Information Design>Forms

E-mailing and Submitting PDF Forms

What’s the easiest way to e-mail a PDF form and have people fill it out?

Sprague, Rich. PDFzone (2004). Design>Information Design>Forms>Adobe Acrobat

Editing Forms in Acrobat 6  

The Form tool as we know has been abandoned. There is now a Field tool which is subdivided into tools for the individual field types.

Wyss, Max. PDFzone (2004). Articles>Information Design>Forms>Adobe Acrobat

Conflict Resolution in XML - Forms For All

Conflict resolution is required wherever we have multiple concurrent changes to a single information set. In practical terms this applies, for example, to concurrent editing environments, to replicated database instances which are being updated independently, to address-book changes on a PDA that must be merged into a master database that has itself been changed. Resolving these conflicts very often requires human intervention. This paper looks at the use of XML forms of various types to reduce the drudgery involved and to take advantage some of the greatest strengths of XML, using pipelining and easily-understood representations to allow a decision-maker to work with minimal drag.

Nichols, Thomas, Nigel Whitaker and Robin La Fontaine. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>Forms

Enterprise-Level Web Form Applications with XForms and XFDL

This paper describes a platform for the XML definition of secure, intelligent web-based applications. XForms provides a powerful model-view-controller (MVC) pattern that may best be described as a cause-and-effect XML processing model originated by XFDL. This paper describes a new version of XFDL that consumes, or skins, XForms. Hence, this paper presents the first integration of the standardized XML markup for expressing the core processing of a web-based form applications (XForms) with a host language (XFDL) that offers security, precision presentation, a document-centric capability, and other features that contribute to a more rich user experience.

Boyer, John. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>Forms>XML