User-centered design of data entry forms for semi-structured data

While recent improvements in hardware and application platforms made it widely feasible to provide well designed and easy to use user interface (UI) solutions, most development lifecycles still lack the proper evaluation of usability, resulting in an inferior user experience once too often, especially if the UI contains any novel components. Providing a usable data entry form to handle semi-structured data, for instance, requires more than a statically selected collection of already known interface controls. This paper proposes a UI solution to efficiently manage such data in an easy to learn manner, and describes the evaluation process we utilized to verify and enhance its functionality. According to the results of the conducted usability tests, the presented concept provided a comfortable and effective way to enter semi-structured data.