Form Efficience Analysis Tool (FEAT) (04-Nov-2009)

Form Efficience Analysis Tool (FEAT)

Recently IBM* switched to a new conference call system. It is possible to link the call-in phone numbers to your office suite application and with the click of a button, add the call in numbers. This saves employee's time when setting up a meeting in the office suite application. The creation of a meeting invite involves many steps. If cost savings idea is to save the employee time, then the question arises, "What is the most time consuming step in this process?" If one statically looks at the form, they could reason that it might be the look-up of email addresses. Or maybe finding a conference room location. Only empirical data can truly show the most time consuming steps.

This idea addresses the question, how best can I improve my interactive application so that it saves the user time. Advancements and innovations in such forms can be seen everywhere. For example, many websites retain a list of "ship to:" addresses. These are physical addresses that the user had previously had items shipped to. This allows a shopper to quickly assign certain items/gifts to be shipped to their friends and family.

Now the question arises for the form developer what part of the form process is most time consuming for the user? For example, if the developer can reduce the amount of the user spends in the on-line "check-out" process, it saves the end user time and frustration and it also saves the company computing resources.

Proposed is a method to automatically augment a web form, and collect statistical data on the time spent by the user to fill in the form. This statistics can then be used to determine the total collective time saved by the form users versus development costs needed to enhance the form.

Consider the example of the meeting invite application. The user is attempting to create an invite and the user kno...