Hp’s Concept for a JavaScript enhenced form

I choosed to enhance my learning flash card set to be the JavaScript automated form requested for STAF 14.

Exercise two could need some enhancement. The situation was at the beginning an exercise where the user had a rather difficult task to perform: ranging five text evaluation due to the their readability. There was some risk that the user would step to the solution page before he thought about the problem completely.

Because this was a rather small task I decided to program a second form, the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument.

The enhancement I planed:

• A user friendly way to rank the five texts from best (ranking 1) to worst (ranking 5).
• A feed-back that gives the user an idea whether he has completed the task or has to go on thinking about the problem.
• The feed-back should not allow the user to solve the problem just by trial and error.

Solution

User friendliness

The user should make his ranking just by clicking. No entering of text is needed. This can only be achieved either by radio buttons or choice-lists. I prefer choice lists because they need less space.

Upgrading a text to a rank already assigned to an other text shall automatically downgrade or upgrade the other texts.

Feed back

First feed-back is given whether the ranking is complete or not. All choice list are not pre-set to any value.

A second feed-back is given, whether the answer is completely right.

Difficulties

JavaScript falls short in different ways:

• no specialised code editor is available
• missing language elements, no drawing of graphs like in Applets
• variables seem to be only valid on the actual document, but there is no documentation available on this
• no debugger is available
• the method clicked() does not work in navigator 3.01
• there are no arrays in JavaScript 1.0 but there are arrays in form objects. This makes programming rather difficult.
• Because of all this difficulties, I gave up programming a perfect solution.

Second Task

Because this page seemed to be a to small task to accomplish I decided to bring the short pre-test for the Ned Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) to the Web.

User Interface

Multiple Choice by check-boxes. The Computer counts how many words are already chequed. When there are eight checked words in each section the user will be shown a graph that displays his brain dominances and some information of the most commen brain dominances.

Solution

User friendliness

The user should make his ranking by clicking on check-boxes.

The check-boxes of one secton should be viewed all together also on smaller screen areas (500*350 Mac, 750*550 PC)

Movement between introduction, three sections with check-boxes and evaluation by frame.

Feed back

Information on how many check-boxes are already checked.

Warning when to many boxes are chequed in one of the three sections.

evaluation

I created the Charts as GIF-images for the different brain dominances and converted them with GifBuilder to GIFs. I would have prefered to create the charts programmatically, but JavaScript has no drawing function.

The evaluation page is choosen due to the results calculated for the characteristics chequed.